News : CyanogenMod team officially drops support for 30 devices

Gaurav Chandiramani / August 2, 2012

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the CyanogenMod team recently announced that devices sporting the first generation of Snapdragon SOCs, namely, devices with the QSD8x50, MSM7x25, MSM7x27 and MSM7x27T SoCs, will not be supported beyond CyanogenMod 7.x (Gingerbread) branch.

The complete list of devices, 30 in total, that won’t be supported beyond CM 7.x are :

ZTE Blade
HTC Desire
HTC Desire CDMA
HTC Wildfire
LG Optimus Pro
HTC Tattoo
Samsung Galaxy Ace
Droid Eris
LG Optimus Hub
LG Optimus Chic
Xperia X10
HTC myTouch 3G Slide
HTC Hero
HTC Hero CDMA
Droid Incredible
HTC Legend
HTC Aria
Motorola Cliq
Motorola Backflip
Geeksphone ONE
LG Optimus One
Google Nexus One
Xperia X10 Mini
Samsung Galaxy Fit
HTC Evo
Samsung Galaxy Mini
Huawei U8150
Huawei U8220
Commtiva Z71
Geeksphone ZERO

As you can see, most of the devices in the above list are either low-end phones or at least 18 – 20 months old, so its not really surprising to see them in the list.

The CyanogenMod team said that pushing these devices to be compatible with CyanogenMod 9 (Ice Cream Sandwich) would involve violating or breaking the Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS).

In their words: “The CTS is used by device manufacturers to ensure that their changes to Android source do not break Android API, platform and other standards. This, in turn, brings stability to the Play Store for app developers. Breaking CTS would lead to a bad and inconsistent experience for app devs, which in turn would lead to a bad experience for you guys as users. If CyanogenMod was perceived to be blatantly violating CTS, developers could eventually blacklist CyanogenMod users from using their apps (or worse, Google could blacklist CyanogenMod from the Play Store altogether). No one would win by going down that path.”

They also said that, if in the future they could find a workaround that didn’t involve violating the CTS, they would consider revisiting this topic. I feel that’s highly unlikely, so don’t get your hopes high.

You can check out their official post on their Google+ page here (No, you do not need to sign up for Google+ to view the page).

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By Gaurav Chandiramani

Gaurav Chandiramani is a tech guy from India who likes to write about himself in third person. He writes about Android for OMG!Droid whenever he gets a chance to. He is passionate about Android, Linux, Open-Source software and Technology in general. His favourite hobby is Apple Bashing.