Last week, news broke that CyanogenMod, the highly popular, open-source custom Android ROM are closing shop, leaving a whole lot of Android users who swear by flashing custom ROMs in the dark and without a reliable alternative to fall back on. For many, CyanogenMod was the epitome of the whole Android experience. In a time when custom UI skins were all the rage, CyanogenMod provided an alternative to those seeking a Nexus like stock experience. Now that it is time to bid adieu to the old champion of stock Android, let's go back in time to see what made the custom ROM so popular in the first place. The HTC dream was a landmark device in the history of CyanogenMod. With its release, software tinkerers found a way to gain ultimate control over the OS. This came to be known as “Root Acess” and combined with the Linux-based nature of Android allowed customizations to be layered on top of Android.
This blew open the gates for modified firmware and soon enough a developer by the alias JesusFreke along with Steve Kondik came up with CyanogenMod. And the rest, they say is history.
CyanogenMod's popularity skyrocketed among a crowd dissatisfied with laggy third party UI skins and soon ballooned into a passionate community of developers who worked on CyanogenMod. The small version updates came to be known as ‘Nightlies’ and were circulated using a distributed revision control system and its repositories were posted in open-source forum GitHub for anyone to access and edit and cook their own ROM.
The first CyanogenMod ROM was named CyanogenMod 3 and was based on Android 1.5 Cupcake. Every proceeding Android version that came out got its own version of CM, up till CyanogenMod 14.1 based on Android Nougat 7.1.
In the early days of Android, most consumers were stuck with bloated OEM skins filled with useless third-party apps that could not be uninstalled, taking up the majority of the storage space (Think a maximum of 512MB). This created a unique opportunity to custom aftermarket firmware to do what the OEM’s were hesitant to do, offer a lag free, stock version of Android with all the useless bloat removed.
That wasn’t the only reason, though, CyanogenMod also offered an unprecedented amount of customization on top of stock Android, everything from changing the icons in the status bar to a fully featured DSP mixer for music. Later versions of Cyanogen also included Theme engines allowing users to fully customise the aesthetics of the UI. Many features were born from the community driven ROM, some were even integrated into official versions of Android. To think, it has taken Google until the release of Nougat to include options for customising the quick access panel, when it was already available in Cyanogen for a long while before.
More than the customization, however, what made Cyanogen stand out was the passionate community of tinkerers behind the scenes, people like us who broke open the secrets of Android in their spare time. It was the rallying call for a community growing increasingly tired of OEM’s. CyanogenMod kick-started a drive to make Android open to a vast amount of users, offering them ways to improve their experience or in some cases, even extend the shelf life of their old smartphones, giving them a new lease of life. It was instrumental in portraying an aura of openness around Android, a quality that drove some away from the rigidity of iOS and it’s kin.
Perhaps the greatest triumph was the inclusiveness of the community, passionate discussions on forums became the driving force for many features that made their way to the ROM. Some even leading popular add-on’s like Xposed Mod, which allowed users to cherry pick features from popular ROM’s and have them installed in one place. This was also the birthplace for many popular forks off CyanogenMod, modified with new kernels, optimisations and some unique features like PIE control which sprang up in the Paranoid Android custom ROM. It was also one of the first ROM’s to include multi-window, something that has trickled it’s way to Android in Nougat. It was the feeling of creating something together with a passionate group of people that gave CyanogenMod a unique feeling of togetherness.
Soon CyanogenMod grew big enough to start a company of its own, fostered by deals with several third party manufacturers that wanted the ROM on their devices, which was ironic considering its birth as an alternative to OEM skins.
CyanogenMod as good as it was, did have some problems. The first of which was the need to root your devices, which in many cases, voided warranty. This was later fixed with the court ruling that legalised this but it still posed a massive security issue. There was also no way to test for the sea of Android devices that were in the market, leading to varying levels of performance, sometimes even with two identical devices. There was also the case of Nightlies, it was the best way to get new features fast but on the flip side, it also could mean a laggy phone with apps crashing all over the place. The level of quality control that big manufacturers invested in simply was not possible in a relatively small community driven effort.
Love it or hate it, CyanogenMod leaves behind a legacy that will shape the future of Custom ROM’s in the time to come, in a space of few years, we have witnessed the peak and the fall of a company that championed user choice. In bidding goodbye to the poster child of the custom ROM community, we are also ironically starting afresh. For many it will be back to the drawing board in a race to see who will become the next CyanogenMod. It signals the beginning of a skirmish that will leave many bloody but ultimately will decide the next heir to the legacy of user choice.
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