The CyanogenMod team has announced that it won't be able to officially support phones powered by first-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon chips in version 9 or 10 of its popular custom firmware. The CM team broke the news on Google+, where it revealed that a combination of hardware limitations and concerns for user experience quality were behind the decision. This means many older Android handsets that shipped in Q1 and Q2 2010, such as HTC's Nexus One, Desire and EVO 4G, will not see official CyanogenMod 9 or 10 builds, and will have to look elsewhere for their ICS or Jelly Bean fix. All affected devices will continue to be supported on the Gingerbread-based CyanogenMod 7.x branch, the team says.
Explaining the technical issues behind the decision, CM highlighted the good old Nexus One. In order to run CM9 or 10, the phone's internal memory would need to be repartitioned, and even then the lack of certain proprietary code for the phone's SoC (system-on-a-chip) would've made for a janky user experience -- "the pieces just aren't there." The team notes that it wouldn't be impossible to get ICS or Jelly Bean running on this hardware, but that doing so could break third-party application support because of the hackiness of the code involved.
If you still want Android 4.x on your Nexus One, you'll certainly be able to do so on other custom ROMs (and unofficial CM builds), though you'll sacrifice stability in order to do this. It's unfortunate, but when you remember that most of these phones shipped more than two years ago on Android 2.1 or earlier, it's not all that surprising.
We've got the full list of affected devices after the break.
Source: +CyanogenMod
Affected devices: ZTE Blade, HTC Desire, HTC Wildfire, LG Optimus Pro, HTC Tattoo, Samsung Galaxy Ace, HTC Droid Eris, LG Optimus Hub, LG Optimus Chic, Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, myTouch 3G Slide, HTC Hero, HTC Droid Incredible, HTC Legend, HTC Aria, Motorola Cliq, Motorola Backflip, Geeksphone One, LG Optimus One, Nexus One, Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini, Samsung Galaxy Fit, HTC EVO 4G, Samsung Galaxy Mini, Huawei U8150, Huawei U8220, Commtiva Z71, Geeksphone Zero.
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