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I currently believe the viability of cyanogenmod is a myth and that its irresponsible to perpetuate it as an option. I dearly wish to be proven wrong. When I t

I currently believe the viability of cyanogenmod is a myth and that its irresponsible to perpetuate it as an option. I dearly wish to be proven wrong. When I tried to find cyanogenmod images for mainstream Samsung models, I could not find anything viable to make it worth even trying. Some users will report it works but the majority have show-stopper issues with one or more of: wifi, battery life, stability, phone calls, gps, performance etc. I suspect its unrealistic to ever expect an open source project to provide an up to date production ready image of an OS and closed drivers for 100s of different hardware models without substantial community interest and commercial funding. Out of warranty mobile phones are just too complex, too fragmented and too niche a need to service properly.

Nagyman 12y ago
While the OS remains open source, Cyanogen Inc has venture funding and at least one phone[1] comes pre-installed with the OS. So there is interest in maintaining a production ready image. I don't think the complexity/fragmented argument holds when a similar situation with GNU/Linux exists, which supports many, many permutations of hardware. [1] http://oneplus.net/one http://oneplus.net/one
morsch 12y ago
He probably was referring to the Galaxy Nexus, which I assume has decent enough (probably perfect) CM support. Like you say, achieving compatibility with every piece of Android hardware out there seems unlikely, mostly because of proprietary binary drivers. I don't see how that makes CM unviable, though. You just have to factor in CM compatibility into your buying decision. That means either basing a decision on past experience (ie. based on previous models, any new Nexus hardware -- if there is any -- should be ok), or waiting a bit after new hardware is released to see how it turns out. Of course the latter option is pretty painful for most of us. It's too bad Google doesn't seem to care about any of this, though. It would have been nice if Android One devices came with guaranteed access to/documentation of the proprietary driver blobs, or, better yet, open source drivers for all components, or anything in that vein. But I think we're long past expecting stuff like that from Google.
justin66 12y ago
> When I tried to find cyanogenmod images for mainstream Samsung models, I could not find anything viable to make it worth even trying. Some users will report it works but the majority have show-stopper issues with one or more of: wifi, battery life, stability, phone calls, gps, performance etc. I wonder if the mainstream models you're talking about are the ones with locked bootloaders. It would be interesting to know which ones are more likely to get attention than others.

Nagyman 12y ago

While the OS remains open source, Cyanogen Inc has venture funding and at least one phone[1] comes pre-installed with the OS. So there is interest in maintaining a production ready image. I don't think the complexity/fragmented argument holds when a similar situation with GNU/Linux exists, which supports many, many permutations of hardware. [1] http://oneplus.net/one http://oneplus.net/one

morsch 12y ago

He probably was referring to the Galaxy Nexus, which I assume has decent enough (probably perfect) CM support. Like you say, achieving compatibility with every piece of Android hardware out there seems unlikely, mostly because of proprietary binary drivers. I don't see how that makes CM unviable, though. You just have to factor in CM compatibility into your buying decision. That means either basing a decision on past experience (ie. based on previous models, any new Nexus hardware -- if there is any -- should be ok), or waiting a bit after new hardware is released to see how it turns out. Of course the latter option is pretty painful for most of us. It's too bad Google doesn't seem to care about any of this, though. It would have been nice if Android One devices came with guaranteed access to/documentation of the proprietary driver blobs, or, better yet, open source drivers for all components, or anything in that vein. But I think we're long past expecting stuff like that from Google.

justin66 12y ago

> When I tried to find cyanogenmod images for mainstream Samsung models, I could not find anything viable to make it worth even trying. Some users will report it works but the majority have show-stopper issues with one or more of: wifi, battery life, stability, phone calls, gps, performance etc. I wonder if the mainstream models you're talking about are the ones with locked bootloaders. It would be interesting to know which ones are more likely to get attention than others.