Cast your mind back to the summer of 2010, before Samsung was the king of Android and before Android was the king of mobile. The original Galaxy S flagship had a single-core Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM and Android 2.1 Eclair.
Today, three and a half years later, the family of Galaxy S devices, from the Bell original to the Rogers-exclusive Captivate and Telus-sold Fascinate, have long been forgotten by their respective carriers, not to mention the OEM itself. There have been three major releases since, and we’re expecting a fourth, the Galaxy S5, to be announced at the end of the month.
And while the lifespan of the average Android device, from a carrier and OEM perspective, tends to be just under two years, communities like CyanogenMOD keep working to make newer versions usable on older hardware. That Google optimized Android 4.4 KitKat for devices with lower RAM counts helps indeed.
It’s quite amazing that the CyanogenMOD community continues to iterate on builds for these older devices. Nightly versions of Android 4.4 KitKat-sporting CM11 are now available for a number of aging Androids, including the aforementioned Galaxy S variants, along with the out-of-favour Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus. More modern devices, like the HTC One S, One X, One X+, Motorola RAZR, Galaxy Note 2, Galaxy S3 and Galaxy S4 Mini, are also being graced with CyanogenMOD 11.
Now that the company has raised a significant amount of funding, and is looking to be identified not just a custom ROM developer, but a straight-up Android OEM partner, expect them to be in the news more often.
[source]CyanogenMOD[/source][via]Android Authority[/via]
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