The world's number one pick for custom ROM, CyanogenMod, has been making great strides toward a stable Ice Cream Sandwich build for all supported devices in their repository. There's been some big changes in this version of Android, and many features of CyanogenMod 7 are no longer relevant, while new features have been added. The CM team has already released several early versions of their build for use, and there are tons more coming down the pipe. Want to know exactly where the project is, and what challenges it's facing? We do too.
The CyanogenMod team released a project update just a few hours ago. Since the source code dropped last month, the team has been very busy picking through all the new features in Android 4.0. If you've watched any videos of the OS in action, you've no doubt seen that Google has borrowed a few little tweaks from CM7, such as swiping away notifications, and baked them into Android for everyone. The CyanogenMod team is very excited about this new iteration of Android, and because of all the new stuff, they have to evaluate the features that were in present in CM 7, and decide what to drop for CM9.
Several devices, as we mentioned, are seeing ICS builds release in alpha forms. The Nexus S (available in ROM Manager) is the first daily driver-ready build to be released. It's still not perfect either, but we'll be waiting a few months before truly stable builds begin to appear. As for other devices, the team has said that the first devices to see releases will likely be those built on OMAP 4, MSM8660/7X30, and Exynos chips. A few Tegra 2-based tablets, such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and ASUS Transformer, also have builds coming in the near future.
The goal is to continue to support all the devices currently running CyanogenMod, all way back to the G1. However, at least one old device will be not be seeing further support. Original Droid owners will need to look into upgrading soon, if they want to continue to receive support. The Droid will be dropped from the list going forward.
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Our goal is to provide continued support to all CM7 devices back to the QSD8250 series of devices such as the Nexus One. I don’t want to make any promises at this time, but that is the plan. And sorry Droid1 owners, we’re dropping support for you. Time to upgrade.
Google has also made significant changes in Android and they way it deals with older proprietary camera and graphics drivers. They're good changes, but they also mean there's more work for the team on that front. They are confident that they'll be able to overcome those challenges, as they always have.
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There are a number of challenges that we are up against. Google has made some pretty major changes to the Android framework that break compatibility with older proprietary camera and graphics drivers in order to achieve some pretty insane performance, but I am confident that the team will be able to overcome these issues like we have in the past.
For those who want to develop builds for themselves from source, we'll let the team explain just what's in store for you.
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For those of you who like to build CM from source yourself, you probably know that the spin-up time when starting a CM7 build is absurdly long due to the high number of devices in our repository. Koush and Arcee have put together a solution to this problem that adds new devices on-demand to your local repository, saving on both bandwidth and the long startup time. Some other great enhancements are coming too, like a completely overhauled music app, a new file manager, and a new launcher based on stock 4.0.
And there you have it. Work is proceeding nicely, and we can all hope for great CyanogenMod builds for supported devices coming over the next few months. You can keep up on further development by visiting the CyanogenMod website, or by reading the news we'll be posting as it happens.
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