I have had a lot of friends and other people asking about Cyanogen and why would I replace the stock rom on all the Android Phones I got (2 at this time) with Cyanogen. I believe this deserves a bit of writing. I have started in the world of Android back on Samsung Galaxy S in July 2010. At the time, my Nokia N97 had just died and a friend of mine (you know who you are 🙂 convinced me enough to go to Android. At the time, my device was served with 2.1 which honestly was kludgy, slow and buggy. It took a month before I rooted the phone and applied another ROM, Samsung leaked 2.2 beta at the time and I liked how fast it was, then followed custom ROMs especially Darky’s Rom which is an excellent choice if you want to stick on Samsung stock but with optimizations.

I have to say that despite all the ROMs I tried, it felt something was missing, I wanted fast and optimized, running on ext4 and not Samsung’s RFS. In march 2011, I eventually installed CyanogenMod, still considered beta at the time, after a not so straight forward install, I was on it. My only regret, the battery life. I haven’t been the only one to complain about it, it was definitely faster to eat up the battery than stock. But the trade was still unbelievable, fast and snappy, like a dream, almost like I had bought a new phone… Then Samsung released the SGS2 and I sold my precious, not without a tear, especially not knowing what it would hold.

May 2011 came and so did my SGS2, delivered with Gingerbread 2.3.3, very fast phone, Samsung made the sane choice to get rid of MFS and stick to EXT4. Major improvement if you ask me. A bounty went out for Cyanogen on the SGS2. Samsung then later gave a free phone to Cyanogen developers. In July 2011, the first public build was out, I installed it straight away. It was not exempt of bugs, namely the light sensor and some bluetooth issues, but again, it beat stock straight away.

We are now at the end of September, and CM7 still isn’t considered as stable but man, the amount of bugs and additions the devs make is simply tremendous. The latest nightly is now on 2.3.5 (something Samsung hasn’t released yet) and bug fixed a plenty. In conclusion, the release pace of Cyanogen is every phone maker’s dream, a team of devs going faster and working hard at releasing the latest and greatest from Android’s official sources, there are issues but in fairness so with the official stock ROM and as for the ugly, apart from one or two stone cold freeze, it was more of a catchy title 🙂

Last but not least, it is only fair to finish the article with a link to the official site. If you feel like they helped freeing your phone (well just take a look at the impressive list of supported devices), you might want to donate (link on the frontpage of the site). That is all for now, good fight and good night!