CyanogenMod

After a week of voting and after nearly a thousand votes, we bring to you the winner the Thread Throwdown contest! *Drumroll* The winner is: Greg Willard   Thank all of you for your entries. Keep your inboxes synced and watch for an email. To all ... [More] contestants including the winner: we will be contacting you soon for some swag! A big thank you to everyone for submitting! [Less]

In our second Developer Spotlight, we are introducing members of the Cyanogen design team. We’d like to give the CM community a chance to get to know the creative minds behind Cyanogen. These individuals are excellent resources to the community and ... [More] should be utilized as such. We asked each of them to write a short introduction. Each individual brings unique experiences and expertise in fields such as mobile, web, gaming, and more. Some team members also have a long-standing history with CyanogenMod, which was ultimately part of the motivating factor in them coming to work full-time on a product they love. Left to right: Dave Kover, Tyrone Samson, Hayden Schoen, Adrian Valencia Foulk, Asher Simonds, Nick Santos, Aaron James, Brett Pearce   Dave Kover|Product Designer Hi! I’m Dave. In my role here at Cyanogen, I focus on our Themes product. This position really has 3 key ...Read the Rest... [Less]

Welcome to our first Developer Spotlight, a short Q & A with community staff. This is our way of taking a moment to recognize the many talented developers who contribute to one of the largest community driven open source projects around. Dan ... [More] Pasanen, also known as invisiblek, is a device maintainer inside of the CyanogenMod community. He has been a core contributor to the project since 2012 with nearly 1900 contributions. Dan is currently keeping himself busy maintaining multiple devices for CM, fixing device specific and CM-wide bugs. His current daily driver is a Verizon G3. You are well known for your work on a wide array of LG, HTC and Samsung devices and even did some work for the HP Touchpad. Out of every device you have worked on, which device would you say was the most fun and the absolute worst to work on?  I’m not sure I can pick one ...Read the Rest... [Less]

Many of you are likely familiar with the “I void warranties” shirt from 2014 – a popular item featuring hometown hero Cid that many proudly sport. Now we’re ready to come up with a fresh new design for 2015, and we want to see what crazy fun ideas ... [More] the community has up their sleeves! Introducing the CM Thread Throwdown! The Thread Throwdown is simple – submit a design and if your design is voted tops by the community, your design will become the next CM community t-shirt! We will be printing up shirts and doing a free giveaway after the Thread Throwdown finishes and the top design is picked. The shirt will also be submitted to Teespring so that any one interested in purchasing one may do so as well. No profits will be made off of the shirts or designs. Please be aware that ...Read the Rest... [Less]

Sorry for the clickbait title, but given today’s news cycle from most of the blogs, I couldn’t resist using their same tactic. For those looking for a good read on Cyanogen Inc’s announcement, head over to AndroidCentral. To highlight the one take ... [More] away that matters to CyanogenMod users – We are not bundling or pre-installing Microsoft (or any Cyanogen OS exclusive partner apps) into CyanogenMod. Edit: Those reading the AC article have asked about ‘ads’ showing up. No, those won’t be in CyanogenMod either. And yes, that April fools joke is still a prank. Your nightlies will not see a sudden influx of Microsoft applications – you can put the pitchforks down. CyanogenMod has historically stayed neutral on your services of choice, whether you use Google, Amazon or Fdroid; we leave that decision to you and we have no intention of changing that. What you will see are new APIs available in ...Read the Rest... [Less]

Part 2 of our dive into CyanogenMod Lollipop; let’s take a look at some of the more obvious user space changes and features that you’ll see in CM 12 and 12.1. But first… Android 5.1 As we planned in the last blog post, the 5.1 code has officially ... [More] migrated out of the staging branches and become the full fledge cm-12.1 branch. What does this mean? This means that we have fully merged in the upstream AOSP Android-5.1.0_r3 tag, implemented most (if not all) of the CM 12.0 features and begun focusing on hardware bring-up for our roster of devices. This also means that the buildbots can be switched over for CM 12.1 nightlies at any time. So what are we waiting for? We want you to ‘dirty flash’. Dirty flashing is what some enthusiast have referred to as flashing one ROM zip on top of another. This is usually used to ...Read the Rest... [Less]

It seems Lollipop is on every enthusiast’s mind these days, as OEMs have started a steady stream of OTAs. With this multipart update, we’ll look at the most common questions (minus, “what about my device?”), Android 5.1, and what’s new and improved ... [More] in CyanogenMod. Android 5.1 Let’s start with the latest and greatest Lollipop release, Android 5.1. Released in the second week of March, 5.1 has actually seen two releases – 5.1_r1 earlier in the month and 5.1_r3 just this week. The team has been plugging away at these releases, rebasing and merging like fiends. We’re not quite at the point where nightlies will cross over to being officially branded CM12.1, but as always, you are welcome to track our progress. The CyanogenMod 12.1 (Android 5.1) source is available to sync, and up and running with few issues on various devices – including the latest developer device the Nexus 6. When ...Read the Rest... [Less]

Due to a change introduced this morning to our BusyBox source, to flash a new nightly moving forward you must do a one-time manual process. Download tonight’s (2/14) nightly, unpack the zip and use fastboot to flash the boot.img. Command: fastboot ... [More] flash boot boot.img This will allow you to resume the normal update process. Sorry in advance for the hassle, but this was a necessary change for how mounts are handled in BusyBox. As Sony devices use a combined boot and recovery.img (no separate recovery partition), fastboot is the only way to workaround this latest change.     [Less]

“Today we have a guest post from CyanogenMod contributor, Cyanogen Inc. employee, and co-author of the new CM Theme Engine to provide a brief overview of how the Theme Engine works. Please welcome Clark Scheff. – ciwrl” CyanogenMod makes it easy to ... [More] quickly customize & change the look of your UI, allowing you to really make your device your device.  As someone that loves to tinker, I like to know how things actually work and I wanted to explain how themes actually work in CyanogenMod. At the most basic level, themes are simply a mechanism to allow resources to be replaced at runtime (as opposed to compilation time – the time when the build is created on the buildbots). I’ll get into more details about resources, but for now just think of them as the elements which make up the application’s UI.  Whenever an application is started, Android loads up the resources associated with ...Read the Rest... [Less]

Android One represents Google’s attempt at reaching “the next billion users” – starting today, CyanogenMod 11 (KitKat) builds are available for the ‘sprout’ devices. As the devices are currently setup for CM11 only (work on CM12 is in progress) these ... [More] builds will trickle once a week, every Sunday. This release represents a few firsts for us. Not only are these the first Android One devices and first official release of CM for these devices, the Android One device is the first ever officially supported Mediatek device. Mediatek (MTK) devices have been notoriously difficult for the developer community to complete fully functional bring-ups, and this marks a milestone in that effort. The kudos for this goes to a young upstart CM contributor Varun Chitre, who had the beginnings of CM on the Android One kicked off within two weeks of Google’s launch. He’s dedicated his time since October to bring this device to Android One users, ...Read the Rest... [Less]