CyanogenMod and the Death of the Android ROM

32:56Flashing a ROM? No. Mine's so vague that it's probably not right. You're probably right. I wrote modding. No. No? Okay. He was ready to say no. So phone freaking is something that people used to do with pay phones where they would play sounds into the pay phone, which would allow them to make free phone calls. Because each number is a specific tone. It's a tone. It's a dial tone. And all it is is it's listening for that tone. And you didn't have to pay for the phone if you were able to play the right sounds into the phone. Because all that's happening on a pay phone is you're picking it up and it's listening.

33:28And when you dial those numbers. You would turn the speaker on. Andrew, that's how any dialing of a phone works. Really? Yeah, like it's using the actual... Like my smartphone, right? Ellis' quick audio lesson. Is that dope? On a nine-button phone, or I guess there's 12 buttons. The rows are all one tone, and the columns are all one tone. So it's actually each button is playing two tones in harmony, decided by the coordinates. The frequency interaction between those tones is picked up at the other end, and it is connected to a logic board. that puts it all together. It's all Sonic. So you can dial a phone just by putting a speaker up to a phone and playing.

34:10No way. This is only like landline phones. Only landline. Because I think a lot of people listening right now phone means very different. What's a landline? There are some people alive who think they can do this on their smartphone. That's not what we're talking about. But I literally have never. I can't believe I've never heard that. They used to make these little devices and you could go up to a payphone and like call someone by just playing into the payphone for free. That's hilarious. Yeah. It was epic. Wow. Anyway, yeah, Jesus Freak, which was a fun little play on words. Unreal. Yeah. So this user emerged on XDA quickly as the maintainer of the most popular Android ROM at the time.

34:47And again, the HTC Dream came out in October of 2008. He was the most popular one on XDA by November of 2008. So he spent all of his time just immediately going and ROMing this phone, right? and this is people just in their free time it's not like a full-time job this is just because you wanted to there's no you're not getting paid to mod on on xda yeah right he's got this quote he basically says that uh he pre-ordered his g1 so he was one of the first people to get one and he sort of had to play this cat and mouse game because there was this infamous root bug that didn't allow him to have root access so he had to try to figure out how to patch that bug to give him root access and then he got root access and then they updated it and it took away root access and so he just starts basically going back and forth but he had this awesome rom out called jf rom that everyone just started using for the g1 by the way root on your phone means that you have access to the root directory which is this primary folder where like everything is stored from and the reason that you usually don't have root access on a device is because it's like if you just if you delete system 32 on your computer it's like the primary folder that everything else branches from you could break everything you could just break everything with root access so yeah which we've all done from time to time yeah yeah uh and then in may 2009 jesus freak was hacking away making jf rom and this user named cyanogen made their first blog post on xda with the title cyanogen mod optimizing the crap out of android 1.5 release 2 and effectively they were just making a bunch of modifications to Jesus Freaks ROM and enhancing it.

36:29They were forking the ROM. Interesting. So they didn't fork Android, they forked Jesus Freaks ROM. Exactly. Interesting. Yeah. That's why it's called Android, right? They've got Android Open Source Project, JF ROM, another fork, CyanogenMod. Got it. So the user's name was Cyanogen, and their ROM was called CyanogenMod. You know, it's just like, you know, And what I found is this huge project that has all these cool things that you can hack on. And, you know, it's open source. And with a little bit of work, you could build it for this phone and actually, like, run it and use it every day. So that's Stephanie Kondik, a.k.a.

37:06TheCyanogen. We were finally able to get in touch with her for this episode. It was very hard to track her down. But thanks to Shen for getting us in contact. Wow. Shout out to Shen. Yeah, if you don't know who Shen is, he works at HTC on Vive, and he seems to know literally everyone. Somehow. Been on the show before also. Been on the show before. He's a really awesome guy. He knows everyone. That is Shen right there. If audio listeners, we have a giant cardboard cutout of Shen. But a quick trivia question. What was Shen's first job? How much do you guys want to wager? Are you saying like first job ever?

37:44Are we supposed to know what Shen's first job was? First job on his LinkedIn. On his LinkedIn. Dog walker. I have no idea. Do you guys want a hint? Are we wagering after that? Sure. Do they have to wager for this? This is really hard. Hint sounds great. He's told me before. Oh. We've been talking about it on and off this entire time. Yeah. Okay. I'll go with what I was going to guess then. Okay. Ready? I'll wager two points. Two points. Andrew? I'll wager two points. Making this super interesting. Marques has 40 and Andrew has 19. You know, Andrew, carry the one has 19 and Marquez is 40.

38:28That's furiously. That's so innocent. I don't think mine. I'm wrong, but I want it to be right. I really want to know what you wrote now. All right. You ready? Flip them and read, boys. Flip them and read. You were a moderator. XDA moderator, XDA developer, reporter. I'll do both. Yeah. He was the XDA TV producer from... Oh, what? Yeah, right? TV producer. Yeah. I used to watch XDA TV videos. Yeah. He produced them. That was him. Oh. Whoa. Is that insane? Anyway, that was a quick aside. More Stephanie quotes. I don't know. For, like, somebody who's an engineer, you know, I hate whenever I have a product that, like, there's a bug in it and I can't fix it.

39:10Like, I wish, you know, like, I can help you with this. Please let me, you know, I mean, I understand why the world doesn't work that way, unfortunately, but maybe it could be better if it did. At the time, everything was really new. So things performed really poorly, to say the least, right? There were, there was a lot of things that you could do to increase the performance. So, you know, I knew a lot about that from like working on like data center systems and stuff like that. and really tuning Linux and all that. So I just really kind of dug in there and tried to make something that went faster and felt like a nicer thing to use.

39:52You could just make it better. Yeah, you just make it better. You just make it better. It's like this, but just make it better. Yeah, right. So especially if you're an engineer and you're just using these products and they just have all these issues and you just want to be able to do that, but that company doesn't let you mess with it. That's frustrating. so then you get android and it's like it's amazing you can just you can just make your device better you can just do whatever you want to it so jesus freak and sanogen are kind of working on their own stuff um sanogen mod was a fork of the jf rom and then jf rom was its own little thing and then on august 20th of 2009 jesus freak decides it's a little too much work he just kind of calls it quits he's like this is i just don't want to do this anymore i'm kind of bored um but he does do one last thing on his way out he recommends that everyone using his rom which remember was the most popular rom for the g1 on xda developers move over to cyanogen mod i remember that yeah i was gonna say you mentioned drama before and i assumed the drama was going to stem from one mod coming so much off of one that was there okay no so it's the opposite it's kind of the opposite they're friendly happy they're friends yeah cool yeah yeah they're friends so So from here, CyanogenMod just starts growing super fast.

41:05Stephanie publishes the whole thing to GitHub so other people can add to it and mess with it, right? Because usually it's just one person updating it and you download that, but then she puts on GitHub so then people can fork it. They can add things to the core build. And everyone just starts kind of jumping on this unofficial team. And I'm responsible for this feature and maintaining this phone, and you're responsible for maintaining this phone. And it was kind of cool because there would just be new phones that come out. You're one of the first people to buy it. you're like oh i really want to get cyanogen mod on this oh it's not available yet i'm gonna be the person on xda that maintains cyanogen mod for this device yeah and it was just no one's getting heroes heroes unsung heroes absolutely the heroes of my college career exactly i love those people yeah so this is going the community's thriving everything's great um i just remember loving loving the ramen community so much because everyone was so friendly you could just flash all these different ROMs and it was it was amazing but then in 2009 there was this event that happened that the media dubbed cyanogate and basically cyanogen got a cease and desist letter from google which is scary and stephanie starts freaking out right she's like damn this could be the end i'm scared like maybe i should shut this down like imagine you and a bunch of friends are just kind of like doing this fun project for no reason and then some company comes out of the gate and sends you a cease and desist letter.

42:26Yeah, like if you had a website called League of Legos, and then just like, yeah, I, on the other hand, never did anything with the website, but CyanogenMod was a real thing. But basically, the problem and the reason that Google sent them the cease and desist letter was that they were distributing Google apps, specifically the Android market. And this one thing happened where CyanogenMod had distributed a newer version of Android market version 1.6 before Google even publicly released it. Do you know how that happened? Because it gets put in AOSP, but Google had not put it on a device yet, and so they were really upset about that.

43:08That's understandable. Can I hop in here? Yeah. Boys. It's important to note that at this point in history, there's a very, very, very murky line between AOSP, like the Android open source project, and then Google Apps. At this point, Google Apps are getting shipped on every version of the open source Android project. But whether or not Google Apps are open source themselves is not clear. I remember that moment. It was very unclear. And so basically this lawyer just comes and is like, hey, it's against our terms of service to ship our apps, right? Because AOSP is open source and you can ship to AOSP, but you can't be shipping Google Apps.

43:50Very murky. YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Play Store, Apple App Store. That was an Android Marketplace. Android Marketplace at the time. Android Market. Market. Sorry. So Stephanie ended up working with Google on this. They did talk it through. It ended up not being as scary as she thought it was going to be. Like she thought that was the end. They were going to shut her down. But it kind of was just a like stop like distributing our apps. But like we're not going to stop you from making your ROM. Like keep doing your thing. so it's at that point in time where every time you rom something or you added a you flashed a rom you had to both install the rom and you had to sideload um something called the gaps which is the google apps package yeah so you would you would flash this rom onto your phone but you didn't have any google play services or any google apps so it's kind of useless so you had to force the google apps onto your phone so that you could have google play services you could use gmail and Google Maps and all of this different stuff.

44:50So many memories. Yeah. It was a whole process. Like it got a little bit harder to ROM your phone. It just took longer. It was just two flashes instead of one. It was two flashes instead of one. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a big deal. So luckily Google kind of left CyanogenMod alone after that. They hadn't gone after any of the other ROM developers, but CyanogenMod at that point was the biggest. So they kind of just made an example out of them. And Stephanie says like it was probably just like one lawyer that just got a little trigger happy, you know, just needed something to do. I mean, like my heart definitely sank whenever I got it.

45:20Why are they coming after us? Like, you know, this is like a, you know, like, you know, we're helping them. People from the community are like, you know, submitting all this code back to Google. And, you know, we are like, you know, we're creating features that they're like copying and including in, you know, in Android later on and stuff. That was what struck me the most, because I remember there would be features that you'd see in cyanogen mod or some random mod and then one and a half versions later that would show up in android whether it was lock screen shortcuts or little settings tweaks or something yeah see that i'm very confident i made a video about how that kept happening right how these modifications of android just kept getting swallowed into what google would ship yeah it's kind of like sherlocking right yeah yeah yeah it's like we're just gonna take your ideas because all the tomorrow just people don't work for us we're just gonna we don't have to do the bleeding edge like modifications ourselves we can just see what catches on yeah and once one of them catches on well enough then we're like all right it seems like people really like this yeah there's kind of a lot but they work through it they keep moving on with cyan engine mod uh kind of out of nowhere stephanie lost her job um which was kind of rough for her but she ended up moving to seattle because she got a call from no one other than jesus freak jesus freak was working for samsung at the time and a couple of other people that had been roaming on XDA.

46:38He's like, hey, we're doing this work for Samsung. They kind of have us in this innovation zone. This was the peak point of the Samsung versus iPhone kind of fight. It was like the Samsung phones were really the flagship Android phones. Samsung was like, we need to work up our war chest against Apple. We have to come up with as many features as possible so that people really want to use samsung phones so they basically just recruited a bunch of the modders from the xda forums that's not a bad idea which is a pretty smart thing to do super smart yeah and i think that this is actually one of the reasons why um samsung os samsung mod not mods samsung's os has like a zillion features that you never really use right there are videos all over the internet of like all of the things that one one ui has that you had no idea you could do that's built into one ui and i think a lot of those are a result of these xda people grabbing tons of people to come in and work for them yeah for anything that'll stick yeah yeah just make anything that'll stick was really awesome a year into this stephanie is still working on cyanogen mod in her free time i still have no idea how she managed to like work full-time for samsung and do cyanogen mod every night and put out nightlies every night i guess i'm also surprised samsung's letting her do that right like if i were samsung i'd be like i want all of your best stuff yeah right here yeah under our we asked her about that and she said that it was just kind of a like we don't talk about it kind of thing okay yeah which is cool that's the coolest samsung's ever sounded i know wow well this was like back in like galaxy s3 days yeah yeah so she's working for samsung and she's running cyanogen mod at the same time but she said uh she gets this call from this man named carl pay out of nowhere never heard of him and she also gets a call from a man named kurt mcmaster um so you guys probably know carl pay he's somehow still in the vernacular of the tech scene because he runs a company called nothing that man stays relevant he stays irrelevant yeah at the time he was this upper manager guy for oppo and he calls up stephanie and he's like what do you think about making a phone that has cyanogen mod as the os yeah and i think that he was just like this would be really a community focused thing could be really cool like we can make a cyanogen phone she'd actually been wanting to make a cyanogen first phone specifically because you would look at the iphone and you see that it's like it's this full stack phone right Apple is making the OS and the hardware and you really want to be able to build things into hardware and Stephanie had been frustrated that she couldn't build CyanogenMod through the hardware she didn't have control of that she only had control of the software and it was like on all these phones and you could only do so much with like third party hardware right so they start with this conversation and they start to work together and they end up making a limited edition phone that is running CyanogenMod for the Chinese market what was the name of that phone.

49:47How much do you guys want to wager? Ten points. And remember, this is Carl Pei, who was working at Oppo at the time. If that gives you a little heads up. And also remember, you know, this phone had a non-cyanogen version, too. Yeah. They just also managed to... They wanted to make a special edition. I reviewed this phone, so I should be more confident about this. You did. Andrew, how much are you... Five. Five. Five. Five.

50:16i'm like half sure i'm half sure well the thing i'm half sure about i'm also half sure if that's the correct thing and then i also think there might be something other than this okay if i think i'm gonna i think i know what you wrote based on okay i want to hear yeah i we both have written down what do you think i wrote i think you wrote oppo find one no okay i wrote one plus x oh wrong nope i wrote oppo n1 correct yeah okay i thought like maybe it it makes more sense that it was an oppo phone because it didn't one plus was not yet a thing that's yeah okay and i'm sure we will get into that we will get into that later yeah so at the exact same time as this um she gets a call from this man named kirk mcmaster and there's this quote from stephanie that's like this thing happens in my life where like a lot of stuff just happens at the exact same time she had Carl calling her up asking to make a phone and she gets a call from this guy named Kurt.

51:13Now Kurt is an interesting character. You know how Mariah is always making that joke that she's a 10x fintech founder and CEO? Yeah. I just hope when anyone talks about me in the future they don't say so this Andrew guy was an interesting character. I like that intro. It does not sound like it's red flag stars. I kind of like it. He was a quirky fella. Nope. Nope. He's definitely a quirky fella. Kurt Digg had a few big hits for all of the companies that he was founding on a yearly basis he actually was the co-founder of Boost Mobile which Ellis still uses for some reason let's go baby where my Boost customers at I'll see you on the streets it's a pay-as-you-go phone service that was actually pretty successful for him he did some work for Sony he founded a water bottle company called Core Water he led digital distribution for zedge that ringtone and wallpaper app from decades ago uh he did work for sega he founded a mobile game studio he founded a multi-platform transmedia consumer experience whatever the heck that means his list of companies is really long um serial founder very long serial founder anyway the story behind him contacting stephanie goes he had just bought a galaxy s3 which by the way freaking amazing phone the s3 was like knocking that for kurt apparently nice little oled screen oh it was so good it was i pre-ordered that phone i was so excited about it but he bought a galaxy s3 and he thought or he thought it was the first android phone that could really come close to competing with the iphone right because it was so good it had so many good specs it seemed cool but he got it and he was really annoyed because it didn't have the latest Android version on it.

52:57So the latest Android version at the time was Jelly Bean, but it had the one right before it. And specifically Samsung used to take forever to push major Android updates. This is a big TouchWiz fault. Also Samsung had this UX called TouchWiz. For those that don't know what TouchWiz is, it was Samsung's UX at the time for their smartphones. And it was really bad. You can tell how bad it was by the fact that it was named touchwiz yeah just think about how bad it must be for people to call it touchwiz with a straight face what does that even mean yeah now they literally rebranded it to one ui because touchwiz has so much bad blood yeah do you remember the default touchwiz wallpaper being like water or that was one of them i was thinking about the one that was like a cloudy sky oh yeah then they'd have the giant weather widget which was a different picture of a sky there's two separate pictures in the sky overlaid on top.

53:50HTC did that first. HTC annoyingly pioneered the big weather widget in the middle. I love that, dude. I loved that. I love the big HTC weather widget. Anyway, so he gets his phone. He's like, this doesn't have the most recent version of Android. This is dumb. Why is it taking so long? So he finds out about roaming, and he goes and he downloads Cyan Engine Mod for his Galaxy S3. And it already had Jelly Bean on it. It was more stock android than touchwiz was it was just better in pretty much every perceivable way um and he's immediately obsessed in it with it uh being a 10x fintech founder and ceo he calls stephanie pretty much the story goes that he calls stephanie that night the night that he flashed it on his phone he found her on linkedin called her up and says i'll get the money and be ceo you be cto so he saw an opportunity he was like this is really good most Android ROMs are really bad or most Android UXs are really bad we can make a religion out of this like a mini Elon story Twitter seems nice how about I buy it well ironically if you think about it this is not that different from the story of Android when they originally pitched Android they were going around trying to sell this open OS to a bunch of handset manufacturers now they're like Android kind of sucks and everyone's versions of Android suck so what if we just made a good one and we give it to everybody to use as a basis you know that was kind of their pitch um so stephanie seemed pretty into the idea because she wanted to make her own device carl pay had just called about potentially making a new company that was based around her device which is also cool and he was like i'm a hardware guy oppo is a hardware company we can make a new company that can be really like really good hardware and really good software and kurt had just showed up and it seemed like the perfect kind of mesh meshing of like i'm an engineer i don't want to deal with any of the business stuff but i do want to make my own phone everyone else can kind of like do that stuff for me very quickly after that cyanogen mod kind of gets turned into cyanogen inc um and cyanogen mod still existed yeah right because okay there was a lot of weird bad blood um that was happening because the community was contributing to signage and mod right it wasn't just stephanie that was updating it it was all these people that were adding to signage mod and suddenly they're like wait you're making a corporation out of the work that we put into this rom yeah you're the one making money potentially off of all the stuff that we've done at this yeah yeah yeah it wasn't it wasn't great but kurt's big talent was raising money and tons of money and so he starts going around asking for venture funding not dissimilar to Android.

56:40And the funny thing about this is they started getting funding from pretty much everyone that had a vested interest in making Google control Android less. Right? Because they didn't want Google to have so much power over this thing that seemed to be one of the major like OS's in the ecosystem. Which is like one of the things that they developed that for because they didn't want Microsoft to have all of it. Exactly. Dude. History does this thing where like it happens again. It just does the same thing over and over again. Yeah, it just repeats. So, yeah, Microsoft Invest, Qualcomm Invest. There's a bunch of these big companies that are...

57:18Microsoft Invest, that's funny. Isn't that ironic? That's incredible. Yeah, yeah. So there's this kind of legion of, like, anti-Google Android companies that are like, we want to take away Google's sheer power on this open operating system, which kind of makes sense if you're one of these other companies. So Stephanie made it clear that she was still going to be offering CyanogenMod for free to any like cyanogen mod right there was going to be a difference between cyanogen mod and cyanogen os cyanogen os was the thing that they would sell to a company that already had the hardware but just wanted to like have good software that they could just ship you would charge companies for that and cyanogen mod was like if you're a regular person and you want to rom your phone and throw cyanogen on your phone you can do that for free and at this point has she left samsung to start doing this venture she basically left samsung to do this i was gonna say that's a lot of stuff to be doing on top of sorry samsung yeah so i'm sure samsung would be amped about that but yeah yeah so they go around and they're raising millions of dollars in funding and it was kind of convenient right because carl pay had already called and said like i kind of want to start a company based on this right but they wanted they wanted to maintain control of cyanogen so he's like i'm going to start this spinoff company of oppo called one plus right so he wants to start one plus but he doesn't to do software and stephanie wanted to do hardware but she only did software so it was kind of this perfect merging so they already they're getting funding and they already have a couple of clients they've got one plus they've got they're signing deals with this company called blue out of florida and they were interested in having cyanogen on there so the launch was like a pretty huge success um the one plus one came out with cyanogen os on it which was like a pretty it was a huge huge launch it was kind of the original like poco phone situation it was the og it was like the enthusiast phone because when that thing launched you only knew about it if you were kind of following along you were like okay this they're gonna make a phone this new one plus company they've never made anything before like and they're not in carriers like you have to know about this stuff to see that this phone is launching it hit pretty hard yeah it was this community oriented device and it was$300 flagship build and specs and everything about it was pretty amazing.

59:33Oh, Sandstone. I forgot about that. That was that phone. The original OnePlus One was$299 but they also had a higher tiered version of it with more storage. The original version had 16 gigs of storage. They also had one with 64 gigabytes of storage. How much more did they charge for that much more storage? Is this the closest one? Um, yeah. Sure. Nice. Without going over? Closest without going over. Yeah.

1:00:32What are you wagering? There's Honey Nut Cheerios in the background. Of course. Outside? Not the A-roll. The B-roll. No, no. In the A-roll. There's Honey Nut Cheerios. Yeah, in the A-roll. But I shot the B-roll outside on campus. Oh, yeah. And I just remember being outside on campus with a red camera, just like, this is weird. This is weird. All right. Flip them and read. Marquez says$69. Was the question how many more dollars it was or what the price was? How many more dollars? So the answer is$349. Oh my god. You have to. Come on. Give him the points. I'm going to give Andrew that. All right, not for points.

1:01:12There you go. When do we think the most recent comment left on this nine-year-old video was? Dude, it could be yesterday. Three hours ago. It could be. Three hours ago? 12 hours ago. 12 hours ago? 15 hours ago. It was one hour ago. And it says 2023. Anyone? Nice. Anyway, yeah. So at the time, just like insane specs, insane price, really good hardware, really good build. Everything about it seemed amazing. They don't make them like that anymore. No, they just, they don't. Yeah. I would say the Pixel 7 is like, or the Pixel 8 is like the closest thing you can get. Yeah, maybe. But it's still not, it's still not like fastest chipset.

1:01:51Like it's a little different. It doesn't have sandstone. It doesn't have sandstone. It won't, it won't rip the inside of my pants. And scuff endlessly until the end of time. Yeah. i still have the original sandstone one that i had it looks awful it looks so bad it really definitely got it got the worst end of day dang wear and tear so these are going really well for oneplus right it was kind of this random company that was like a spinoff of oppa which no one in the u.s or any other country had really heard of unless you're in china um and it seemed like maybe this could work it's just that like building a phone from like some different os had never really worked before in the United States.

1:02:31The only other place that this had worked is Xiaomi and TriviaQuest. Well, I just gave the answer away. It's China. It's China. All of my points. I don't know if you guys know this, but Xiaomi, the brand originally started as a custom ROM. Oh, that was, it got really popular. And eventually they just thought we should build our own hardware. So they started building their own hardware. And then that was really popular. And so they just kept making devices and then they started they just started branching out and now when they're one of like the biggest companies in china so xiaomi and oneplus kind of started this with the same similar ethos similar however oneplus was sort of like an oppo thing sub-brand sort of oh interesting yeah so oppo already had all like the hardware stuff whereas xiaomi was started by people who worked at like google and a few other big tech companies and but in china and they were like making their own ROM and then just decided they wanted to make their own hardware for the ROM.

1:03:28Was it they made a ROM and it had a huge following? Yeah, it had a huge following in China. In China, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So pretty cool. And they thought that maybe they could make, OnePlus thought that maybe they could make that happen too with CyanogenMod. It could be like this beautiful pairing where everything that grows from OnePlus and CyanogenMod are like together and they become this huge company, right? But this is where things start to get a little bit shaky. uh so investors were starting to pressure curt and cyanogen inc to actually generate any revenue at all um and they didn't really have a clear path to generating revenue there's kind of this thing that happens in silicon valley where you pitch your idea but you have no idea how you're going to make money and then uh vcs are just like acquire as many users as you can get as many users as you can like get get more people on your thing and we'll figure out the money later um and they don't ever figure out the monetization strategy i guess so when they joined with one plus it was just like we're kind of helping each other out here so there wasn't their big money in there there was probably not a lot of big money because it was kind of like a launch partner thing for them it was like one of the original things but their their main monetization strategy is we're going to charge companies to be the os for this device so they were charging one plus but one Not enough for investors.

1:04:47Not enough for investors, right? They wanted to scale this as fast as possible. Classic. The investors didn't really know what the main selling point of Cyanogen OS was going to be. It was cool, and they were being very brazen, trying to start this thing that Google owned, but it was sort of an anti-Google thing because you're sort of starting it in Google's, like, in Android's own ashes. And it's just weird. And they wanted to remove market dominance from Google while being a sub product of a Google product. It just seemed strange. I mean, you got to be worried about that at any time where if your entire product is based off of something and then you breach into that something space a little too much.

1:05:27Yeah. Are you worried about losing? I think the only reason that a lot of these investors felt okay giving them money and not worrying that Google was just going to shut them down at any minute was that Google would probably get in some weird antitrust territory if they were like, this is open source. And then they shut down a thing that starts competing with them. So that's why they felt okay with doing it. Yeah, but they just wanted to acquire as many users, which was a problem. then bigger business problems uh started to emerge oneplus had planned to sell the oneplus one in a lot of countries uh including india and if you know oneplus one of their primary markets is india um but kurt had sold exclusivity rights for cyanogen os to this company called micromax in india which means that only micromax phones with cyanogen pod could be sold in india whoops apparently he did not communicate that to carl and so it just got really dicey really quickly um really quick trivia question what was the brand of phones in india that was under the micromax brand it was a sub brand of micromax that ran cyanogen and this these are the most numerous devices that have run cyanogen os think uh soldier boy how much do you guys want to wager how many points do i have marquez has 54 andrew with one to carry the one careful andrew there careful adam there was a reddit post saying anyone think that adam's joke about andrew's score is getting a little tired and then somebody was just like andrew needs to pick it up and the original poster's like yeah he does so we're good we're good listen i only got one joke all right I think I'm entirely too confident about this when I'm...

1:07:19Oh, my God. All in. Marquez, do you plan to counter? One point. What? I don't know the answer. I just straight up don't know it. I can't lose points here. I don't know. I don't know the answer. Marquez says vivo. I wrote Alcatel. Adam, stay with me on three. One, two, three. You! It's just you? I thought the soldier phone was a white label Alcatel phone. So that's why I want it. Alcatel is a thing though. It is. This is you ventures. Anyway, this gets really dicey, really fast. It starts to be this like all out public dispute that you can watch in real time happening on the internet between Carl Pei and Kurt McMaster.

1:08:05And it was kind of beautiful to play out. So Carl publishes this letter on the OnePlus forums that's just like – I'm paraphrasing this because it's a bit long. But he says, this week we announced the OnePlus One will finally launch in India. On October 7th, Cyanogen released an update to comply with Indian regulations, which means that the phone would be able to – the OnePlus One was actually going to be able to work on Indian carrier markets, right? therefore it was surprising and disappointing to hear from cyanogen on november on november 26th which was a month and a half later that they had granted exclusive rights in india over the cyanogen system to another company so they update the one plus one to be able to work in india and then the next month they're like you can't sell this in india woof woof yeah big woof energy and Carl Pei was just very like what is going on?

1:08:57So they start this like back and forth where they're making all these public statements at each other about how the other company is trying to screw them and they're each built on the back of each other's backs. The back of your back is also my back. You know, that kind of thing. But Carl does say he attributes a lot of OnePlus's success to Cyanogen, which is probably true. Because, you know, at the time it was like there are a lot of like tiny phone brands that could launch that have kind of no name like carl was kind of a no name he was like an upper manager oppo but that's kind of it um and the only reason that the oneplus one became such a big hit was because it it got all the press from having cyanogen mod on it it's funny because like carl pay built a phone based on the hype of a community then the brands that he created had the hype of a community that he then built a new phone off of Yes.

1:09:51Carl Pei is the original hype man. There are also a lot of open letters from the community that are just not too kind to Kurt about this, right? Because imagine you buy a OnePlus One to use in India, and then they're just like, oh, you can't do this anymore. You can't use this in India anymore. It's easy for them to pick sides. Yeah, it was a problem. At the last minute, because they could not use Cyanogen OS, they had to build another OS, which was called Oxygen OS. So OnePlus had to spin up this new OS because it couldn't use Cyanogen OS. It ended up being one of the most popular OSs in the Android-like world for a very long time.

1:10:31And it was actually not that different from Cyanogen OS. It was very stock Android, very clean, very fast. Not anymore. Not anymore. Well, now it's ColorOS again. Well, they made it ColorOS and then they renamed it back to Oxygen just because people thought they were different, even though they're exactly the same. Yeah, it's all naming conventions and stuff. But things just got worse from there. Every time Cyanogen Inc. seemed to land some big deal, things just kind of stopped working. And there's even this crazy thing that Stephanie says that not a lot of people know about that ended up probably being the death blow for the company.

1:11:04You know, we were working on a project with a couple, with a large U.S. carrier partner and a large manufacturer in China. And it was going to be the mod phone, right? We hired industrial designers. The manufacturer built like the first versions of it. It had this like, you know, really cool industrial design and we were bringing all these features to it. It was going to ship on a major carrier. We had all the stuff in place. And the worst thing happened. The manufacturer got hit with a trade embargo from the FTC.

1:11:49And that basically killed the whole project. Can you imagine what would have happened if a cyanogen-branded phone got launched on a major U.S. carrier? that would have been a very different path yeah for the for the history of android yeah wow very different right yeah you can kind of speculate on who that major oem might have been they got hit from this uh fine from the ftc we think we kind of deduced that was probably zte uh because at the time they got hit with this major major fine something to do with giving a ton of money to iran okay lots of u.s geopolitics going on in here nice um but it sucks right it's like it's like cyanogen is just trying to make their phone yeah so if you remember zte had launched this phone called the zte axon m that was an at &t exclusive might have had that phone it was the one of the first like dual screen phones oh that like it had a screen on each side and it would open up but it was just two separate screens it wasn't like it wasn't a foldable screen oh so like the surface sort of like the surface but it didn't it didn't close in on itself it's like the outsides were screens and it would open like this and it was just like flat on the back so it's a worse surface an even worse surface anyway at uh at &t at the time like was more open to launching more experimental devices like this what real quick year wise what time period are we talking about now early 2016 through mid 2016 yeah so yeah they got hit with this trade embargo they couldn't do it and stephanie has this quote that was like but that was ultimately like the downfall that's what like broke my like broke my soul um you know after like we put so much effort into it you know we had you know we had marketing we had you know we we had the device like it was built right like it exists which is rough because they've been going out trying to do their original thing of like like selling the OS to everybody.

1:13:53And that wasn't working out. And Stephanie had been wanting to build her own hardware for so long. Finally, they're like, we have to make money somehow. Okay, let's build the phone. They go, they build the phone. They have everything ready. It's ready to go. And then ZTE messes everything up. Allegedly ZTE. Allegedly ZTE. Just in case. Allegedly ZTE. So things start getting really bad. They're not making any money. Investors are getting upset. They have a big first round of layoffs in July. then kirk mcmaster steps down as ceo how many sorry how many people do you were working for them at that point i don't have an exact answer but at this point in time they had raised almost 100 million dollars in total and they had two offices one in seattle oh okay palo alto yeah and they were like it was a flush organization yeah okay yeah so so kirk mcmaster steps down as CEO and he sends this email announcing the first pivot of the company to a modular OS.

1:14:52Like they were going to try to license off little bits of the OS to people that needed it. Which seems strange. I think he thought that like yeah, like if someone wants the Cyanogen camera, then we can sort of give them that. Selling it for parts. Always a great. That's the death rattle of a tech company. It's like, well, what about the parts for other things? Yeah. So they tried to make that work, but no. The next month, the Seattle office closes. Next month, Stephanie officially leaves after she gets removed from the board because she's having fights with Kurt. She's having fights with the rest of the board.

1:15:27It's not great. And later that month in December, the final build of Cyanogen OS is released. And then on December 24th, a blog post comes out called A Fork in the Road. this blog post was basically announcing the end and saying goodbye saying that cyanogen mod as well could not go on because the brand was too destroyed at that point and also because like other people now owned the cyanogen brand like they couldn't even do anything with it which is so depressing um but the blog post said cyanogen mod has served the community well over its eight long years it's been our home bringing together their friends from all over the world to celebrate our joy of building and giving.

1:16:14It's apt then that on this eve of a holiday, we pay our respects, we take pride in our lineage, and we move forward and continue to build on its legacy. So Cyanogen was dead. And with it, the ramen community. Was the ramen community dead? This beautiful combination of people who are all bashing together and making something beautiful. Was this the fall of the Android Rom? It's okay. I have the answer. Maybe. Maybe. And we'll find out after the break.

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1:17:40Crafted with our signature espresso and real pumpkin sauce Then topped with whipped cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg The PSL Get it while it's hot or iced Only at Starbucks Welcome back So remember that goodbye blog post called A Fork in the Road? I read it with a tear in my eye Yeah, I remember reading it in my college dorm Same No, I was out of college though It was a little later No, you're right But I might have still been in that dorm It wasn't my college dorm No, I was in that apartment for like two more years. He like broke back into it just to remember the body. It wasn't the dorm, sorry. It was my college apartment.

1:18:18My bad. Anyway, the blog post is called A Fork in the Road. But do you guys, trivia question, know what it means to fork software? How much are you willing to wager, Andrew? This is one. Oh, one. Okay. If that. Everything all in. I feel like this is going to be embarrassing if we get it wrong because we've been talking about it the entire episode. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want to put too many. I'll do like five. I don't know. I have a general concept of what I think it means. With 53 points, you're going to bet five. Sorry, I'll bet three. I have to write it? Andrew said. I just wrote branch off from.

1:19:02Correct. Okay. And I drew a branch. Correct. No, that's just a Y. It's a fork. it's like a tune if I drew it in the middle it would be too complicated for this analogy so it's a so yeah a fork in the road to fork software you know that music video of see you again no you know what I'm talking about by who see you again oh that song remember the end of the music video no no Paul Walker drives down one way oh yes wait are they really in the music video yeah and then just drive away that's hilarious that's cyanogen dang wow it's called a fork the blockbuster is called a fork in the road and in software it basically means that you have one line of software and you fork the software so they this one keeps to be being developed for this use and this one starts being developed in this direction and you could eventually end up with very different looking software that started from the same original base oh i disagree with marquez's model his mind two different directions instead of straight that's why the what minus three no what i drew before would you see what i drew before mine is branched off from which is like a branch on a tree i wish i could rewind what i drew before i had a circle an empty circle and then i had a circle with a dot in it to show that it was the same on one side i don't want to derail anymore so i'll let you keep your three points but i think i was more right i got it okay so anyway yes um the blog post called a fork in the road was kind of a little uh a little hint right sanjan might have been dead and they might have been saying goodbye but reading the blog post again you start to look a little deeper it's like da vinci code through a hyperlink yes it says cyanogen mod has served the community well over its eight years it's been our home bringing together friends from all over the world to celebrate our joy of building and giving it's apt then that on this eve of a holiday we pay our respects we take pride in our hyperlinked lineage as we move forward and continue to build on this legacy and what happens when you click the lineage hyperlink boom a fork appears lineage os thought you meant like a real like an actual an image of a fork appears yes so the first blog post was december 24 2016 so christmas ee and it was that was our that was our blog post saying this is us like it's the same people this is some of the core team behind lineage os uh you'll probably learn more about them in a sec but effectively what happened is a number of people who had been working on cyanogen mod and cyanogen inc were like we're not gonna just let this die right cyanogen mod was an open sourced thing it's very different from when like a company goes under and all the ip that they had just gets destroyed.

1:21:54Cyanogen, the name, CyanogenMod, the name CyanogenOS, the name was owned by Venture Capital, but the actual code wasn't. So all of the code even developed inside of the offices under the official corporation still was open. The stuff that wasn't open source. So they were developing stuff that were closed source for CyanogenOS. Okay. And then they were developing open source stuff for CyanogenMod. Okay. Yeah. And so, yeah, they just took CyanogenMod and they basically forked it, changed the name in all the code from Cyanogen to Lineage OS. Right? This is the launch of Lineage OS. So they put out this blog post.

1:22:35It says, you've probably read the news articles today. If you haven't, please see the following. Yes, this is us. Lineage OS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was. To quote Andy Rubin, this is the definition of open. A company pulling their support out of an open source project does not mean it has to die and i find that very beautiful

1:22:58yeah so capitalism and venture capital might have destroyed cyan engine the company but cyanage us lives on this actually reminds me of a lot of like what happened with boosted yeah like if you guys haven't heard uh the boosted boards episode it's audio only but basically the same thing they got a bunch of venture capital didn't couldn't make enough money and then they fell apart and then they got sold for parts a word to the wise and a million other companies have fallen victim yes yes yes yes yes but of course that was not open sourced right if it's like if it was an open sourced skateboard then somebody else could take the build the open source build of the electric skateboard and make a new company based on it um but all that ip just got sold to lime and all that stuff the sign engine project just needed to be born into something else So the code base was all public domain, but the brand could just be restarted by anybody.

1:23:52I seem to remember this being a time when I started to kind of forget about ROMing, though. You know, this was the end of 2016, December 2016. And if you guys remember, the Nexus phones used to be these, like, awesome, incredible developer-focused devices that Google also sold to regular people. you know it was like they had a different manufacturer make all these devices i can't name every single one right now just in case you're thinking about that trivia question no okay um but wait i'm curious name them all oh you like nexus phones name every single one then we got samsung galaxy nexus then we got lg nexus 4 so good Then we got, let's see, Nexus 5.

1:24:40LG Nexus 5. He's wrong. He loses all his mind. Motorola Nexus 6. Motorola, Shamu, Nexus 6. Huawei, Nexus 6P. Nexus 6P, but also Nexus 7 tablet came out as well. Yes. That was also LG. That was way earlier, though. Oh, sorry. I'm just going in number order. Well, Nexus 7 was called 7 because of the size, not of the number. Yeah. And that was made by? Nexus 7, LG. No. Nexus 7? Yeah. Asus. Oh, right. I had one. Yeah. And then the Nexus 10 was Samsung. Yeah. They skipped so many numbers. Well, those correlated with the size of the screen. That was a 7-inch tablet and a 10-inch tablet. Yeah, so where's the Nexus 3?

1:25:19Yeah, there was no Nexus 3. That's what I'm saying. That's true. That's true. That's true. Yeah. The 6P and the 5X came out at the same time, with Huawei being the manufacturer of the 6P and the 5X was LG. Yeah, at the same time. Anyway. I prefer the 6P. The 6P was the last Nexus phone. But Cyanogen died in December of 2016. What was launched in October of 2016? Marques, you have 56. Andrew, you have two. What would you like to wager? Anything that was launched. Notice that we just talked a lot about Nexus devices. 29 points. We just talked a lot about Nexus devices. and i remember i was saying that was kind of around the time that i started forgetting about romming and i wasn't as interested in like flashing roms on my phone constantly and it was still true that like a lot of features kept getting brought from roms those roms into like new versions of android yeah yeah but like happening over and over why why was i forgetting about romming like we were doing they had nexus devices and like what happened in october of 2016 First one, they locked the boot letter.

1:26:31Andrew, how many points are you willing to win? None. None. Not even going to guess. Is this the first one they locked the boot letter? No. Oh, okay. Well, I wrote Pixel 1. That's true. Correct. Yeah, Pixel 1. Did it take to like Pixel 3 to lock the boot letter? I actually don't know. They might have locked it in Pixel 1. No. All right. Yeah. But it was kind of this, it was kind of like this interesting timing where Sanjin, the The company goes under. SanogenMod has to change. Everyone's kind of losing interest in ROMing because, and then the Pixel comes out, right? This was kind of like, the Pixel was a little bit less open than all of the other Nexus devices that were made for developers.

1:27:13Like, it was still easy to ROM. Google was still committing to Android getting really good. But they were committing more to Android getting really good than before. They wanted to make the Android iPhone. right? They realized, we can actually do this. We want to make a device that can become the bastion of what Android could possibly become. And so it had been a while since Android wasn't very good. And over those eight years since the first Android phone, Google had really built it out. But I think Android was also just more of kind of an open book at that point. You know, stuff was changing a lot.

1:27:50There were more devices that you could actually flash ROMs on. now that you know there were now more manufacturers have unlocked down um and android just became a more mature operating system over time right uh and it just back when it was less mature it was a lot more fun and interesting to rom to kind of mess around with flashing roms because there was kind of more stuff to do there are a lot of features that you could add different manufacturers operating systems were not very good it was just like it was in your best interest to be romming so this kind of left me wondering like okay so if android was good now like what's the point in something like lineage os like are there any people still were there any people still roaming like it seemed like it was it's cool that you picked up the the pieces of sanogen mod yeah but there's got to be way less people actually using it right it's got to be way less but what I was told by the lineage people actually really surprised me you would assume that the community had kind of died and they were barely holding on but how many devices are currently running lineage OS A.

1:29:01500 ,000 B. 1.5 million C. 3 million and D. 5 million All in Marquez do it i'm going nine nine points oh my goodness i'm betting nine points and andrew one carry the one do you have any points andrew hey you have one he's got two two okay flip him and read they both put d um no 1.5 million is the answer but we're optimistic but 1.5 million is still a lot and it is i think that there was a lot of people talking about roaming back in the day because phones were so bad because they didn't have as many features they needed to run faster needed to add things to it and people were just like more willing to be experimental with their devices because they were so bad whereas now it's like most of the stuff the phones do very well you know you have to go through like quite a lot of effort to rom your phone and are you going to get that much out what are you going to get out of it yeah it's not going to double the speed it's not going to make the camera significantly better and there's like a lot of things you you can do as well you can sideload things that you don't really need to flash a whole rom yeah it feels like modifying a car when stock cars are so good and you're like you're you're decreasing your reliability yeah at the cost at the like benefit of not that much extra stuff.

1:30:30Yeah. Yeah. So the people that are flashing ROMs has probably gone down quite a bit. SanogenMod, as they say, had a much younger, more excited user base that was like flashing those nightlies and just talking about it a lot. Whereas now, if you think about it, kind of everything is a computer, right? Like those terminals at like McDonald's that order your food, run on Android. What is a computer? The Quest 3 runs on Android. the Switch parts of the Switch run on Android yeah the Polestar 2 has Android Automotive yeah all of this different stuff all of these things run on AOSP which is Android Open Source Project so like you know if you could just take something that was a better version of Android say Lineage OS that had been like significantly updated and had like newer Android features and just it's open open source you could put it on your device wouldn't you do that instead of using aosp i kind of want to know how many of the one and a half million lineage os devices are not smartphones are there like refrigerators running lineage yeah and like people's basements probably that's awesome yeah i don't think anyone is any companies have really come out and said we are using lineage os as our like basal stuff yeah most of them you like you know you don't need the latest google camera app like michelle told us that his printer runs android it's got like yeah like yeah it's running like android 8 but you don't need like a camera and all this like latest stuff yeah um so yeah well there there are still a lot of community members that are maintaining lineage for individual devices like if you go on the lineage website most popular phones on there are on there and it sort of works the same way as it worked on cyanogen mod where you buy a new phone you decide you want it to be the guy that maintains it you go on and you maintain it and it's kind of fun but it's being used a lot in like in industry now okay which is very different so i'm trying to figure out okay well what really happened to the the modding community right like people stopped using this is it just because uh android got mature and things got good right now you might have heard of this kind of conspiracy theory that's been going around for a while, that Google has been taking things from AOSP and instead of updating AOSP, they just update them in the Google apps, right?

1:32:51And this is sort of a major thing that has been happening for quite a few years now. So yes, Android is open-sourced. And if you want to use Android, you can use it. But it's like the camera app's gonna be from like Android 8. And this app's gonna be from Android 8. I made a video about this. Yeah, yeah. And they started just like using their own stuff. And like they have like Pixel X now. And the Messenger client in AOSP is different from Google Messages. And like everything is like Google this, Google that versus the AOSP versions. So there's kind of this conspiracy theory that Google intentionally, they need to make money off of Android, right?

1:33:28They originally made it open source because they needed to get as much of a user base as possible. But then at one point they were like, how do we monetize this? we can't keep giving away all the good stuff that we're making for free it's like the fourth time this has been brought up like somebody's like we gotta be but wait i gotta make some money i really want i really want to do it yeah so i asked a lot of people right i asked michelle asked the lineage guys like i was kind of like trying to ask them like do you think this is the main reason that rami has like gotten so not popular you know that google is like taking AOSP and making it a lot harder to like build stuff off of.

1:34:07And they actually think that it makes a lot of sense for Google to be doing this. Because the biggest reason that they say is that our phones are now a much more major part of the way that we live our lives, right? And back in the day, you could ROM your phone, you could do whatever you wanted. And like, you would still go to your bank, maybe. And there would be a banking app, but the banking app was really bad. It was very new. And as our phones kind of get more mature and have become a more integral parts of our lives, there have been people at those banking companies are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

1:34:40This person is throwing an OS that we have no idea what it is and the security features we have no idea what it is and they're using our banking app on some phone. and so a big reason that both the lineage os people and people like michelle think that roaming is like getting a lot harder and people are not doing it as much is because now google has made it that if you use a custom rom on your phone things like banking apps don't work right and imagine your banking app doesn't work like that's a major reason not to rom your phone you can't use a lot of the core features that you would want to use on your device yeah it's not worth it yeah it's not worth it anymore because like what are you gonna do you're gonna get like you're gonna like unlock your snapdragon processor and get faster performance like what does that even mean i don't have my flashlight but like early on when we're talking about like romping phones and doing it all the time and resetting it and like just so little of your life was on it back then like it was a device that's accessory your phone is everything about you at this point there are so many insanely important things and if something were to mess up on your phone you could be really screwed for a while so like it's way scarier to also just like do things to your totally yeah yeah so security is like very important yeah you know there's security patches and bug fixes all the time just all the time as like it's like it's a rat race as soon as there gets there's this bug that people find out about they got to patch it and then people exploit it and patch it and exploit it and this whole thing um random trivia question there is a fast food app that does not work if you mod your phone which one which one all of my fast food app oh god doesn't work you're wagering all of your zero points i don't know why i feel like i have zero points i thought you had two and then he wagered them all last time we'll give you a credit of 50 100 points whoa 50 points 50 point i get 50 because marquez won't let's wager more than 10 what's marquez at 76 i've gotten a bunch wrong okay i wager 50 points there's a the only thing andrew is this confident about is taco bell but i don't want to say taco bell that's it's a little bit concerning that's the nicest thing you've ever said remember that there is remember that there's a prize don't you want to win the prize Oh, fair.

1:37:06Wow, he got a credit. Well, that's interesting. Well, I'm going to write a fast food app. And I don't think I'm right. But what are you wagering? Oh, you said I had what? 76. Six. Six. Six points. Wow. Imagine only wagering six points. Andrew could potentially end up owing me 50 points. What? What does that mean? What's the question again? There is a fast food app that does not work if you mod your phone, if you unlock your bootloader. What is that fast food app? That's a good one.

1:37:46I don't know. All right. Oh, I saw you write. I wrote Wendy's. No. Oh, God. I wrote Starbucks. No. The answer is McDonald's. Ooh. Yeah. michelle says he doesn't really know why this is the case i don't know i'm so sad that i got that wrong yeah i have a guess i mean it probably has to do with the money thing right yeah it has to do with g pay like i have there's is that what they call it now is that what the kids are calling google pay google wallet google pay google wallet no wallet pay g chat google pay google hollow yeah probably does like a check and if there's anything wrong with the yeah it's just funny that is.

1:38:29That's only McDonald's that does that. That was the one that Michelle pointed out in particular. It could be other ones too. Starbucks does a lot of the same stuff. Well, Starbucks is a bank. That's what I was going to say. When you wrote that and how many Starbucks gift cards, yeah. That's how Starbucks makes all their money is by investing your money that you add to your card on the app. They're literally a bank. That's why it's called Starbucks.

1:38:56Wow. Anyway. Yeah. Anyway, minus 70 points. Yeah, I felt horrible to say out loud. Yeah. So yeah, security is just becoming really important because our devices are kind of like this one stop shop. They really are PDAs now. And so as security gets more important, all of these apps are like, I don't want this unknown like OS to be running my app, especially when it has things like your financial details on it. Because if they get in trouble, they're going to get in a lot of trouble. Risky. Yeah. So it's getting more closed down. And surprisingly, people like the lineage os team and michael are like yeah that makes sense we actually totally understand that right so it's not as much of the like google is intentionally trying to make android harder to use they really think that the reason is because of security i'm sure they're also like they don't want to be the one to create something and then that winds up being the reason somebody loses a lot and then they have to think like that's kind of our fault yeah like not not even legally but Which is like that sucks to think like we did something that a bunch of people lost important things.

1:39:58Yeah. Yeah. But it is a bummer because like even RCS does not work in AOSP. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Like the messaging client of AOSP doesn't have RCS support. That's funny. You have to use Google Messages, which is crazy. But, you know, the spirit of roaming is not dead. There's plenty of open source material that's being published consistently. um people like stephanie are a huge open source like people they like really advocate for it and i think that even if these roms like lineage os are not the level of cyanogen mod like they used to be where the community was like there were so many people and everyone was super excited about all the time and flashing every single day i think every community will always have enough people that want to maintain it and just for the reason that they want to maintain it right they're They don't have to make a company out of everything.

1:40:49And that's kind of the magic of open source. You don't have to make a company out of this. Gotta make money out of this. Gotta make money out of this. I just remember, yeah, the modding days were fun. They were. I had my, and I still have it, the original Motorola Droid that I had. And that phone, I can't believe it still boots. That phone went through it. And that, my Galaxy Nexus, I had custom ROMs. I was overclocking those phones. I had custom kernels where you could choose like, all right, let me get up to 1100 megahertz when the screen is on, but then underclock down to 200 megahertz when the screen is off and have this refresh rate so that I can like cycle between those clock speeds quickly and end up with a faster phone with longer battery life with all these custom kernels.

1:41:32It was insane. Yeah. These phones were cooking in my pocket. Just trying again. It's unreal. Crazy levels. And I was flashing nightlies. I was doing all that. That was quite a time. Yeah. Yeah. When was the last time you tried to ROM a phone? I think right around the time that Cyanogen was done I remember being on the nightlies I remember doing a lot of Paranoid Android because that was like an alt-rom right around when Cyanogen was super alt-rom yeah it was like Cyanogen was the big one it's not a phase mom but there was like Paranoid Android on the side which is like oh it's got these cool themes and a couple extra kernel features for my like overclocking desires but I definitely wasn't doing it much after like 2015 2016 I did it once on my Ares nice yeah that's all i remember nice shout out to the heiress i just think it's like pretty incredible how important cyanogen mod ended up being to like a lot of stuff that happened you know like one plus only really exists the way it does because of cyanogen mod yeah i mean it was a community-based thing that was also built off a different person that built something and then made it to like it's literally in the history of android at this point and like android phones in general so that's wild yeah so while we might not do a lot of roaming ourselves anymore.

1:42:42I think it's beautiful that communities will still come together and make open source projects that are really cool. You want to do one more trivia to round us out? Can I get 50 more points? Sure. I wager everything. All right. Can I get how many points do you have? No, I'll take 50 points. That works. I think that's okay. Marques has 70 points. All right. What famous piece of science fiction media does the name Nexus of the Google phones come from? We've definitely I talked about this before. I have no idea. Second you said famous media, I was cooked. I'll give you a hint. This famous piece of sci-fi media has androids in it.

1:43:21Star something. Let's go with androids. These androids may or may not be asleep sometimes. And while they are asleep, they might be doing something. Alright, what'd you guys get? I wrote The Bachelor. is this is it i'm gonna feel horrible did you put starbucks again i'll give you a hint the book and the movie have different names and i'll accept either androids dream of electric sheep and um well do androids dream of electric sheep is this wrong he put star wars that is unfortunately wrong david is right and the movie is um blade runner yes yeah famous media in fact he wagered all his points Marquez wagered all his points and he had 70 points so now he has zero Andrew had negative 50 and wagered 50 I did not wager 50 Andrew has negative 100

1:44:20the android from Blade Runner the model is the Nexus 6 what oh wow and the estate of Philip K. Dick sued Google over it that's really funny yeah dang the prize for the winner is a lovely 3d printed crown that tim is handing you may hand it to marquez because he won with zero points over my headphones tim is placing the crown on marquez beautiful nice little tiara all right it sucks a little uh little spin i think on this crown i think the winner of every trivia moving forward gets this crown i like that passed around i like this crown yeah yeah i'll write my name on it and then every subsequent winner should also do the same there we go okay but uh it was fun kind of like recapping on what happened from the birth of android up until now and how important the open source community was to all of that i mean as someone who wasn't part of that community and did very little knew just enough about it to know what cyanogen mod was and then to know about it as in like inside of one plus and stuff yeah it's fun it was a crazy set of years dude sounds like something i would have been into and i was flashing cyanogen mod nightlies every single day wiping my device every single day i would lose all of my data all of my photos every single day for no reason because i was a nerd same that's you and me both yeah simpler times simpler times but it was a good era of Android.

1:45:56Yeah. Zero points. Thought about it. And we'll catch you guys in the next one. Remember, there's a regularly scheduled episode for Friday so don't worry about that. See you later. Peace. Way For More is produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Robben. We are partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music is by Bane and Sel.

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