Cyanogen OS And Services To Be Euthanized At Year's End After Epic Fail To Best Android

It's been a very rough year for the folks at Cyanogen, and it doesn't look like anything is going to be changing about that any time soon. At the end of last month, it was revealed that Cyanogen wanted to consolidate all of its employees to Palo Alto, California, which as an announcement on its own might not have seemed so bad, but it came at the same time that co-founder Steve Kondik decided to pack it up and move onto other ventures.

Alcatel's POP Mirage shipped with Cyanogen OS

Now, we learn that Cyanogen's OS and services are going to be shuttered at the end of this year (aka: one week from the time of this post). This was announced on the Cyanogen website with a small, bittersweet message:

As part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen, all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued no later than 12/31/16. The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally.

If there's an upside to this shuttering, it's that the open source code will remain open source and available to anyone who wants to take advantage of it. But what's this mean for Cyanogen, then? The company once threatened Google's Android dominance, and is now backing off of that entirely. The goal now isn't to try to kill Android, but instead complement it.

Last month, Cyanogen's Lior Tal penned a quick post to say that he's excited about the new consolidated team and looks forward to leveraging the company's technologies in "new and exciting ways". If you're concerned that the company could just go poof, Lior assures us that the company is well-funded, and that it's able to recruit more great people as it requires expansion.

All we can think of is, "how the mighty have fallen". Cyanogen was a de facto choice for anyone who wanted to get away from their stock Android ROMs, and some even had the software come preinstalled (eg: OnePlus 1), and while options like these will likely never go away, it's still unfortunate to see a legend end up like this. We can hope that whatever the team has in store for 2017 will be surprising, and big enough to keep the company running smoothly.