First CyanogenMod 12.1 nightlies could arrive next week

Android 5.1 Lollipop was officially released by Google earlier this month, so it’s perhaps not surprising to hear that CyanogenMod, one of the leading custom ROM development teams, is busy working to support the very latest version of Android. CyanogenMod 12.1 is apparently already working with few issues on a number of devices, but isn’t quite ready for nightly releases just yet. These are expected after another week or so of clean-ups and testing.

Although not quite ready for the mainline branch just yet, the team has already given out a few details about what to expect with CM12.1.

One of the more instantly noticeable differences will be changes to the UI of several CyanogenMod apps. CM Messaging makes the move over to circular avatars and sports a new FAB button. The app is also now fully Android Wear compliant. The browser will be given a new icon and will make use of Lollipop’s vector support, while the FM radio app for Qualcomm based devices will see similar design tweaks. There are also changes to Ambient Display and LiveDisplay in the works, although details on these will be published next week.

Interestingly, the developers also announced that they are officially reversing the decision to use unified builds for handset variants. The reason is quite simply that, despite the similarity between hardware, builds were still proving prone to failures, particularly when it came to properly implementing sensors and NFC. Unified builds are to be abandoned, instead the team is to focus on project structures that allow them to make use of ‘–common’ projects to help speed up development.

Speaking of development, the CyanogenMod team is also further expanding to bring support to new devices. You can find the full, rather long list in the blog post.

If you’re eager to try out the CyanogenMod take on Android Lollipop, you can already find a number of nightly CM12 (Android 5.0) builds for a range of handsets on the CM website’s download page.