CyanogenMod supports a lot of Android phones and tablets: dozens officially, and a handful more can be found as side projects for the members of the CM team. Bit one of the questions they get asked most frequently is, will my phone/tablet/ereader/phablet/toaster oven get CyanogenMod 9, the Ice Cream Sandwich release of the popular ROM family? To help dispel some of the uncertainty, CyanogenMod released a flow chart that spells out which phones will, won’t and may or may not be officially supported. Click here for a full-sized version.

Long story short: if your Android device has 512MB of RAM or less (like the original DROID, Nexus One and pretty much everything from before summer 2010) you won’t be getting CyanogenMod 9 officially. The rest of the modifiers get a little more tricky. If the manufacturer is planning an ICS release and there’s already an official build of CyanogenMod 7 for your device, you’re quite likely to get an official CM9 build. If Your device is close enough to one of these in the hardware department, your odds are about 50/50. If there’s no manufacturer ICS update coming and the device doesn’t have a dedicated GPU, odds are slim to none.

If your phone or tablet doesn’t qualify under the CM9 team’s guidelines, don’t despair. Since CyanogenMod is published as open source code, plenty of independent modders release their own slightly different releases (often known as “kangs”) for pretty much every major device out there. Even those pesky Motorola phones with locked bootloaders can get in on the action in some cases, albeit by using some flaky kernel tricks. And there’s always other ROMs out there, or (shudder) you could just wait for a manufacturer over-the-air update.

12 COMMENTS

  1. “Long story short: if your Android device has 512MB of RAM or less (like
    the original DROID, Nexus One and pretty much everything from before
    summer 2010) you won’t be getting CyanogenMod 9 officially.” GG

  2. When it says “is the manufacturer releasing ics?” Does that mean in general or for the specific device? Cuz if its in general, I’m pretty sure sthis means the original incredible has a good chance of scoring some cm9. That is beyond cool.

    • It can be (though rarely) on a general level, or (more likely) further down the line, directly related to the chipsets the device is running. In either case, the Inc is still one of our targets.

      A slight correct, the Nexus 1 and family have 512mb RAM, the Droid 1 has half that. 

      • Wow, That’d be amazing if the Dinc could run CM9. I’m running the Dinc2 but bequeathed my Dinc to the wife. Gotta keep the wife happy eh?

  3. Older phones like HTC’s need HTC to release ICS builds for the same chipset so they can use the drivers — because ICS has so many big changes.

    We’ll see but this is a good start.

    •  I’ve got an ICS ROM (dumped from a Nexus I think) running on my old HTC HD2 – works nicely, and always tempts me to come back to it from my SGS2. Also, with GSM on and Wifi connected and NO USE(!) it gets like 5 days on a charge. Pretty cool backup…

  5. Looking at the flow it´s pretty clear that…
    if ( RAM >= 512 ) then Cyanogen9if ( RAM < 512 ) then ! Cyanogen9

    Don´t know who wrote the article but he is just confusing people.

  6. Typo in the story; ‘Long story short: if your Android device has 512MB of RAM or less’ should read ‘Long story short: if your Android device has less than 512MB of RAM’

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