CyanogenMod Inc has a new employee: the founder of one of the other popular custom Android ROMs. Developer Roman Birg created the Android Open Kang Project in 2011. It’s an open source, Android-based operating system known for offering users a huge array of options for performance tweaks and visual customization.
At this point AOKP is a large project with many developers, so it’d live on even without Birg’s involvement… but he says he has no plans to stop contributing to AOKP once he joins the CyanogenMod team.
Like AOKP, CyanogenMod started out as a custom version of Android that was developed and maintained by hobbyists. In 2013 a group of core CyanogenMod developers formed a company, raised venture capital, and started working with hardware partners to make CM a viable option for companies that want to ship products with a different version of Android.
CyanogenMod developers also clearly have a lot more time to put into the project these days — they’ve been releasing new features and services at a pretty fast rate in recent months.
In other words, its kind of a dream job for developers who had been working on custom ROMs as a hobby — now they get paid for the work.
Update: Chameleon OS founder Clark Scheff is also joining CyanogenMod Inc. Chameleon is an Android ROM based on CyanogenMod that features a theme engine that lets you customize the look of the operating system.
via Phandroid, AOKP, and /r/android