This has certainly been a rocky year for some, with the likes of pioneer smartwatch maker Pebble dropping off the radar, and here we are with word that Cyanogen would be shutting down their services this December 31st. Apparently, this move has been described by the folks at Cyanogen themselves that it is “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.”

There, you have it. As long as you have the mad coding skills to go along with CyanogenMod’s existing structure and source code, feel free to make full use of it and construct some of your own versions or mods. Otherwise, it is the end of the road for those who are using CyanogenMod on their respective Android-powered smartphones, and perhaps it is time to start looking elsewhere -- pronto! After all, any software that is no longer supported or will be updated runs the risk of actually being hacked or exposed to malware as well as those with malicious motives.

This particular move does not come across as surprising -- far from it. After all, the company has gone through its fair share of internal turmoil, and it has finally translated to CyanogenMod being killed off. With the end of this particular episode, there is a new hope though. Cyanogen did confirm that they are working on a new open-source initiative that they have called Lineage. The Cyanogen team shared, "the open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally."

Affected smartphones: What next?
Now that Cyanogen services are about to be shuttered at the end of this year, what are the implications for smartphones that have CyanogenOS running on them, including the OnePlus One and Lenovo Zuk Z1? The answer is pretty simple: there will no longer be any more new updates available from Cyanogen, and the community will simply have to sit tight and see what Lineage OS will look like, assuming it is released sooner rather than later.

The CyanogenMod team also mentioned (Update: the link appears to be defunct despite being up four days ago), "It will come as no surprise that this most recent action from Cyngn [Cyanogen] is definitely a death blow for CyanogenMod. Cyanogen Inc (Cyngn) announced that they were shutting down the infrastructure behind CyanogenMod (CM). This is an action that was not unpredictable given the public departure of Kondik (cyanogen himself) from the company, and with him our last remaining advocate inside Cyngn's leadership. In addition to infrastructure being retired, we in the CM community have lost our voice in the future direction of CM - the brand could be sold to a third party entity as it was an asset that Kondik risked to start his business and dream. Even if we were to regroup and rebuild our own infrastructure, continuing development of CM would mean to operate with the threat of sale of the brand looming over our heads. Then there is the stigma that has grown to be attached to anything named 'Cyanogen'. Many of you reading this have been champions of clarifying that the CM product and CyngnOS were distinct, yet the stain of many PR actions from Cyngn is a hard one to remove from CM. Given CM's reliance on Cyngn for monetary support and the shared source base, it's not hard to understand why the confusion remains."