Future CyanogenMod ROMs Won't Have Android L Features Anytime Soon

Android L has been in news ever since the next version of Android was previewed at Google I/O. For those of you who are hoping to see it on a CyanogenMod ROM, here is some bad news.

The folks at CyangogenMod have announced that no version of their popular ROM will be seeing any Android L features until Google releases a final and stable build of the latter.

The team behind the ROM released a roadmap that detailed their plans for future development. In this, it was revealed that Android L is being considered as a "secondary" priority for now, according to PhoneArena. For now, the developer will focus on polishing and further enhancing CM 11 M8 (Android 4.4.4 KitKat), which will be released on 4 July.

The reason behind this decision is fairly simple. The Android L source code that has been currently released could be drastically different from the final version, which will be launched later.

"Google's early release and access is something they have never done before, and it is going to wildly help developer adoption of the new L platform; this is exciting to see happen. However, this doesn't take away the fact that the code, being a preview, is non-final and likely going to change.

"No one outside of Google knows how much change this means – it could be minor, or it could be substantial. We could spend the next three weeks working on integrating CM features against this new platform, and then have it suddenly change dramatically and break in the final release of "L". This would boil down to a waste of time.

"Now, just because we aren't switching gears to CM12 right away doesn't mean we won't be checking out the code release from today. This opportunity gives us the ability to cost out the level of effort for each CM feature, identify gaps in "L" and possible solutions for them, figure out what CM features can go, and run preliminary assessments on how badly device support will break," the CM team said.