14 DAY TRIAL // CyanogenMod 7.x is the latest and highest official release that the owners of a Nexus One smartphone or of any other devices from its generation will ever receive.
The development team behind the custom ROMs has stepped up and announced that they would not be providing any new upgrades for these devices, since they would be time and development effort consuming.
“The Nexus One, along with the other first-generation Snapdragon devices (devices with the QSD8x50, MSM7x25, MSM7x27 and MSM7x27T SoCs), will not be supported beyond the CM 7.x (Gingerbread) branch,” they announced on Google+.
The team also explains that, while they were looking into ways to make this happen, they realized that the time and effort they would have to spend to deliver updates to these devices would be far too great.
“The Nexus One in particular would have required a custom hboot to repartition the internal memory (which itself was limited to 512 MB, like most devices of that generation) and the proprietary libs available (from 2.3) would have required compromises in the CyanogenMod code,” the team explains.
“The wide variety of MSM7x2x(T) devices, on top of these problems, also have a complete lack of media libraries that are compatible with the new APIs introduced in ICS (video decoding and encoding, specifically). The pieces just aren’t there.”
They do note that these devices would be able to run Ice Cream Sandwich and even Jelly Bean, but that the final experience would not make it at all for the work one would have to do to make it happen.
The team also explains that each of their releases is tested to assess whether it can deliver the expected experience in terms of speed, performance and the like, and that there’s a ‘pass or fail’ mechanism that they need to take into account, the Android Compatibility Test Suite.
“The CTS is used by device manufacturers to ensure that their changes to Android source do not break Android API, platform and other standards,” the team notes.
“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.”
Provided that CyanogenMod was found to be blatantly violating CTS, it could end up being blacklisted from applications, or from the Google Play Store altogether.
“For users that are adamant about trying to run ICS and beyond, options exist. We are not going to recommend other builds however, as they are more than likely breaking CTS, and therefore our quality assurance standards as well. You can find them if you look in the usual places,” the team concludes.