The “L” is for Lollipop

Happy New Years (for all you Gregorian calendar folks)! Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and month of December.

In the CM11 M12 post, we mentioned that we were entering the beginnings of CM 12 work, based on Lollipop. Today, we are enabling CM12 nightlies to showcase how far we’ve come since. The full list of devices ready for tonight’s first rollout is further below.

We would like to note that at this point we consider ourselves 85% complete for our initial CM12 M release. We’ll spend the remainder of this month bringing up additional devices and finishing up the features you’ve come to love from CM11 – implementing them into the new Material UI.

At this point, the following large items are not implemented, but should be in the next few weeks. Some additional smaller tweaks are also missing, but left off this list:

1. Theme Engine
2. Quick Settings reorganization and customization
3. Quick Settings Ribbon mode
4. Navigation bar reorganization and customization
5. Sound panel customization
6. Lock-screen quick unlock

Astute Gerrit followers will note that some of the above are already in various states of code review, and patches are available if you’d like to build these features (work-in-progress) yourself at home. The command to sync CM12 sources is repo init -u https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android -b cm-12.0

CM11 features aren’t the only thing we’re working on, with new features such as Ambient display, a brand new Messaging app, and some small tweaks including a weather option in the new Lollipop extended status bar. Our team is continuing to work on new additions and we have some big plans ahead for L.

The full device list for today includes:

1. bacon
2. d802
3. dlx
4. e975
5. e980
6. evita
7. falcon
8. find5
9. flo
10. ghost
11. hlte
12. hltespr
13. jewel
14. jfltevzw
15. klte
16. m7
17. m7spr
18. m7vzw
19. m8
20. mako
21. mondrianwifi
22. moto_msm8960
23. t6
24. t6spr
25. t6vzw
26. serrano3gxx
27. serranoltexx
28. shamu
29. v500
30. ville
31. vs985
32. Additional devices will trickle in as the days go on

All devices in this list are shipping with full hardware support for the essentials (Calls, WiFi, BT, GPS, Camera, etc). Depending on the device some additional hardware (niche) may not be functioning, eg. IR Support – but nothing that will impede your ‘daily driver’ usability. As always, these are nightlies, so there may be are bugs to be expected. Our JIRA for CM12 nightlies will be up and running tomorrow night  (regression reports between CM12 builds only; please don’t report something broke/missing between CM11 and 12, we already know).

With this initial push for CM12, we are also moving CM11 builds to a weekly status (every Sunday). With core efforts changing over to CM12, the 11 branch is seeing less frequent changes; therefore, needing less frequent builds. CM11 M13 is still on our roadmap, and will be the final CM11 build before we code-freeze the 11 branch.

With that, some words of wisdom:

1. This is an Android 5.0.2 Lollipop-based release - update your third party addons to ensure compatibility
2. The CM backupscript.sh in recovery will ignore and remove incompatible applications from your system partition (these are usually non-CM apps that users have opted to install). You must install a compatible app (or app pack) to regain that functionality
3. You can flash CM12 nightlies directly from CM11 M12 or CM 11 nightlies (no need to wipe), provided you read and followed items 1 and 2
4. Once on CM12 nightlies, you cannot downgrade back to CM11 without wiping – if you are thinking of just exploring the release, then take a backup of your existing installation if you want to go back to it.
5. You’ll need an L compatible recovery

Happy Flashing,

The CyanogenMod Team