People that know CyanogenMod also know Cyanogen, Inc. And people that know either of these names know that they strive to get Android as up-to-date as possible on as many devices as possible. This weekend begins with great news for those of us with an international variant of the Samsung Galaxy S IV Active, or the GT-I9295 if you only care about model numbers for accuracy. The folks at CyanogenMod have released the first nightly build for the I9295 model of the S IV, who is known to be a minor star from 2013, overshadowed by the regular Galaxy S IV and HTC’s One.
But today, the S IV Active gets the CyanogenMod treatment with its first nightly build. As with all things root and ROM, installing it will void your warranty. Fact. Next, to install it, you should probably have a functioning backup of your Touchwiz system, and have both the nightly and an up-to-date GApps (Google Apps) package to flash right after it too (so you can actually access the Play Store). Finally, and the most important one, is that since this is both the first build, AND a nightly build, there will be bugs, crashes, errors, and broken things galore. Don’t expect it to work flawlessly, and be prepared to restore your phone to normal if something doesn’t work.
What this all means, warnings aside, is that the S IV active is not a dead phone, however Samsung may treat it. And with CyanogenMod 11, based on Android 4.4.4 Kit Kat, running on it, with a slimmed down experience and lesser RAM usage, you should get better performance, no Samsung required. The team at Cyanogen and CyanogenMod will likely update the device until either the device maintainer leaves or sells their device, or it gets too far outdated, like we heard the Galaxy Nexus has with regard to Android L custom ROMs. But for the time being, if you happen to hate Touchwiz or just want to spice up your S4 Active, I9295, then go get that download from the source below, and let us know what you think!