With year 2016 ending in next few days, the latest development by Cyanogen has spoiled the party for some of its fans. The company announced that it will terminate all its current operations by the end of 2016. The untimely exit of Cyanogen has created a vacuum in the smartphone industry. Going forward, you need not expect any major updates to the OS including nightly builds and security updates.
The main aim of Cyanogen was to occupy a major market share by killing the Android platform developed by Google. With Android going strong, Cyanogen is no longer in the picture. If you have Cyanogen loaded smartphones such as OnePlus, you need to migrate to the open source release of the OS. However, you need to take an action only if you have the original OnePlus.
Cyanogen lost the plot with ineffective strategy
Even though Cyanogen sold its OS to handset manufacturers such as WileyFox and OnePlus, it lost the plot somewhere in the middle. Moreover, the company lack the required resources to develop its own customized Android user interfaces.
Initially, Cyanogen was the only source for tech geeks who want more features than the stock Android. If you had worked with any of the stock Android handsets, you will realize how ineffective it was with no major improvements. Hence, the mod provided by Cyanogen equalized the deficiency of the Android platform. After the first outing, OnePlus decided to move away from the ill-fated Cyanogen and migrated to their own in-house Android build named OxygenOS.
The future of Cyanogen doesn’t seem to be bright
In future, the Cyanogen open source project will probably continue to exist. However, existing developers who make a living out of the mods will find it hard to march ahead. Gradually, the smartphones based on Cyanogen will cease to exist. Hence, there is no major scope in the development of mods. With Xiaomi and LeEco way ahead with their own Android interfaces, the Cyanogen even if it continues in the open source segment will not have any bright future.
In a statement released to the press, the CyanogenMod team disclosed that the ultimate shutdown as a death blow. Even if the framework will continue as an open source project, it will hard to push ahead without sufficient resources.
With no official support, it will be difficult for smartphones to get the relevant security updates. The unavailability of the future updates has been cited as a major reason for the smartphone users not to move to open source release. We expect some other company to take up the responsibility of maintaining Cyanogen but it is highly unlikely since the company is right now a sinking ship.
In November, we reported that the company has fired employees and is on the verge of closing down. That being said, it’s hard to beat Google at this point in time.
Cyanogen was once a great product that offered customized user interfaces as an alternative to Android. However, with the release of Pixel and other smartphones by Xiaomi, CoolPad, and LeEco, it became tough for Cyanogen to stay in the competition.
We can only hope that something good will happen to Cyanogen in the upcoming days. Let’s wait and see. Stay tuned with PC Tablet.
