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 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 the source code, using CM as a platform for other developers to do cool things with. Remember when CM 9 had support for Host Card Emulation well before that functionality was available in Android proper? How about adhoc WiFi support? Those kinds of pushing forward of the Android platform are something we have done for years, and will continue to support whenever we can – but do so in a non-’force you into it’ manner. We’re all about options here.
On that note…
CM 12.1 Nightlies
A week later than we anticipated, we’re ready to flip the switch for a multitude of devices to begin release of Android 5.1 based, 12.1 nightlies.
As we stated last week, these are safe to install on top of CM 12.0 official builds, with the caveat that you must manually update your third party add-on zips. For most of you, this boils down to finding an Android 5.1 compatible gapps if you want a working CM installation with Google apps that don’t crash.
Do recognize that these are the first releases, and as such they may have some cobwebs. Regression reports are being collected via our JIRA, so please do let us know if we broke something.
Gerrit Updates
We took Gerrit down last night for roughly an hour to process some much needed changes. This brings us up to date with the latest Gerrit version, and crucially, addresses the death of Google’s OpenID service, replacing it with their Google OAuth. Non-Google OpenID accounts should still be functional.
We are aware of some Google OAuth users being marked as ‘untrusted’ due to this update and are working on the solution. Expect the dust to settle with this update by the weekend, and we should be back up to 100%. If you are bit by other Gerrit issues, let us know in the comments below.
Happy Flashing,
The CyanogenMod Team