LineageOS Rises From CyanongenMod’s Ashes With Support For Over 80 Devices Including Nexus 6P
To kick things off, LineageOS made new builds available for Google's Nexus 6P (angler) and Nexus 5X (bullhead), Motorola's Moto G4 and Moto G4 Plus (athene), Nextbit's Robin (ether), and Xiaomi's Redmi 1S (armani). The available builds are labeled "lineage" rather than "cm" and use the same build number system as CyanogenMod, where 14.1 stands for Nougat 7.1 and 13.0 means Marshmallow 3.0.
For those who have not been following the situation, the short story is that CyanogenMod closed up shop at the end of last year. The company's Cyanogen OS was hugely popular among Android modders. Rather than let it become merely a footnote in the history of Android, LineageOS rose up and to keep the good times rolling.
"LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was. To quote Andy Rubin, this is the definition of open. A company pulling their support out of an open source project does not mean it has to die," LineageOS stated in a blog post in December.
The LineageOS team on Friday issued an update saying it was ready to start dishing out custom builds for Marshmallow and Nougat devices and that it would be supporting over 80 handsets. It then released the first wave over the weekend. Going forward, the developers say they will follow a weekly release cadence, though these release will not include root access built into them. Instead, users can download a separate ZIP file that need only be flashed once to gain root access, or at least they can once it is made available.
"Regarding installation, we recommend that users wipe when switching to LineageOS, and reinstall their gapps. However, we recognize that this can be time consuming, so we are offering an EXPERIMENTAL (read as, if it fails, you’ll have to wipe anyways) solution," the LineageOS team says.
You can grab the LineageOS builds here.