CyanogenMod 9 gets a stable build

For many people, including myself, the only way to get the latest version of Android running on their phone is to root the device and install a custom ROM. One of the most popular custom ROMs for Android devices has always been CyanogenMod. According to a blog post on the CyanogenMod blog, the team is finished with CyanogenMod 9 and considers the build to be stable. The team is moving on to work on CyanogenMod 10.

CyanogenMod is a custom ROM based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and comes without any of the bloatware that carriers or manufacturers like to add, such as extra apps or a custom UI skin. CyanogenMod 9 is based on Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich and while many of the ports for unsupported devices have some issues, the team counts the ROM stable enough and said that they will be maintaining the ROM and fixing any major issues that come up.

CyanogenMod 9 has a stable build now

The next version - CyanogenMod 10 - is based on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. A question that the team has been asked by some people is why they bothered to finish CyanogenMod 9 while already actively developing CyanogenMod 10. Their answer is: “we don’t like to leave things incomplete. There is no profit gained from what we do, so the satisfaction of completing a goal is our only reward.” The final build of CyanogenMod 9 would also work well as a suitable release for the masses, especially those who don’t have a fully functioning release of CyanogenMod 10 yet.

The team had posted an update on Google+ in July that said that they would begin full-fledged development on CyanogenMod 10 as soon as they had a stable version of CyanogenMod 9, which has now happened. The team had also confirmed that porting ‘Project Butter’ over to other devices shouldn’t be much of an issue. While there might be some breakage in existing libs, there’s nothing that a small hack won’t fix. Also, building a CyanogenMod 10 ROM shouldn’t take as long as CyanogenMod 9, since Jelly Bean is just a tweaked version of Ice Cream Sandwich. One of the reasons why it was taking this long to build a stable CyanogenMod 9 ROM is that they had to start from scratch with CyanogenMod 9. Since ICS was a major overhaul over Gingerbread, the team decided to rewrite all the enhancements from the ground up. This prolonged the development cycle, but the end result was worth the wait. For CyanogenMod 10, they just have to incorporate the new code into CyanogenMod 9, which should be a painless process.

Many of the higher end devices have already received test builds of CyanogenMod 10, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, the LG Optimus S, the Galaxy Note and the Nexus 7.

Those interested can download the latest version of CyanogenMod for their devices from the CyanogenMod website.