CyanogenMod founder to work for Samsung Mobile

Although no official announcement or comment has been made by Samsung, the founder of CyanogenMod, Steve Kondik, has edited his Facebook profile to indicate that he has been hired as a software engineer by Samsung Mobile. The impact of this move on the CyanogenMod project is unclear, but Kondik has told the phandroid.com web site that CyanogenMod "will remain a side project", presumably indicating that his work on the project will continue. Kondik says he will be working on Android for Samsung – in a message to the androidandme.com web site, he said: "I won't be blogging about Samsung, especially not in relationship to CM. I will be working on making Android more awesome, though."

CyanogenMod produces free custom ROMs for a variety of Android phones, including several from Samsung; these ROMs do not include GMail, Google Maps or YouTube, or any of Google's other closed source applications. The popularity of these modified ROMs – more than 570,000 have been installed – is partly due to the fact that they are often more up-to-date than the official Android releases for those devices and typically extend the capabilities of the phones.

See also:

• CyanogenMod 7 brings custom Gingerbread, a report from The H.
• CyanogenMod 6.1 RC1 brings 'insane performance boosts', a report from The H.

(ehe)