Another feather in the hat for the Cyanogen team has come to light. At 3:44 PM Eastern US Time, on December 21st 2013, CyanogenMod (CM) has created history and achieved 10,000,000 unique installs; as registered by CMStats. This incredible feat has been achieved in journey which spans approximately 4 years, at the beginning of which the developer Cyanogen had first created the aftermarket firmware by “optimizing the crap out of Android 1.5r2” on the HTC Dream G1.
The figure quoted by CMStats includes slightly over 5.5 million official build installs and around 4.5 million unofficial builds. However, these numbers are only for those devices which have left the CMStats feature enabled and the devices have checked in within the last 90 days. Therefore the actual number of CyanogenMod installs is significantly higher than any figure quoted by CMStats. Interestingly, the devices which rule the list of CM installs in the top three positions are all Samsung devices – the Samsung Galaxy S, the Galaxy S2 and the Galaxy S3. Just for the more curious kind, we have reproduced the list of installs by devices below:
Device Total
galaxysmtd 509,743
i9100 492,575
i9300 456,696
cooper 220,659
pyramid 200,491
mb526 193,650
bravo 192,112
mako 187,057
maguro 176,778
blade 175,284
This news comes at the heels of other CM news we have been receiving all week – including the exciting tidbit that CyanogenMod is the first custom aftermarket firmware to receive Google’s blessings in the form of compliance certification (CTS-Compliance) which allows CM users to legitimately use Google’s Play Store to download apps. The first CyanogenMod Edition phone – the Oppo N1 CyanogenMod Edition – is slated to go on sale just before Christmas, on December 24th.
For the uninitiated, the Android ecosystem is open source and as such developers have access to all the code they need to create unofficial custom ROMs. CyanogenMod is one of the most widely known custom ROMs with “tens of millions of installs”, which offers users the freedom from unpredictable and much delayed carrier and manufacturer upgrade cycles, as well as offers custom features which are not present in vanilla versions of Android.
All in all the CM team is on a roll. I am happy to say that every Android device in my house features in this 10 million figure – courtesy of me of course. So, do you rock a CM ROM on your beloved Android or are you a fan of the stock ROMs with the OEM bloatware inside? We would love to listen to you, write it out in the comments below.