You can’t think of the Android development community without mentioning CyanogenMod at some point. The series of ROMs has been around almost as long as Android itself and today, the CM team passed a huge milestone. If you take a look at the CyanogenMod Statistics page, you will see that the number of overall installs has passed the 5 million mark. 

Owners of the unlocked GSM variant of the HTC One (that means it’s not locked to a carrier) can start flashing some CyanogenMod hotness. Official nightly builds are beginning to hit servers on the web, so start prepping that device. CyanogenMod will bring vanilla Android 4.2.2 with a hefty ton of customizations such as navigation bar tweaks, notification bar tweaks, and the list could go on forever. 

Since Android 4.1 Jelly Bean hit almost a year ago, we haven’t heard the words “Release Candidate” used in terms of a CyanogenMod ROM. That doesn’t mean they aren’t polished and well developed, but the team hasn’t gone so far to make any builds a Release Candidate, until today. 

Development for the Galaxy S4 is taking off by leaps and bounds now that the device is landing in the hands of developers. And you know it’s going to be a good time when the founder of CyanogenMod, Steve Kondik takes to Google+ to show off Samsung’s newest flagship running a build of his custom firmware. Along with his post, he says, “Definitely not supporting the S4.” Oh, that guy sure has some knee slappers. 

It’s almost the weekend, so let’s get a shiny new ROM flashed for you to play with. Today, CyanogenMod launched the 10.1 M3 builds for an impressive list of phones like the Galaxy S3, Nexus 4, One X, Galaxy Nexus, etc. Naturally, as more builds are uploaded for different devices, you can expect to see this already impressive list grow even larger. 

This week, the CyanogenMod team announced that their newest nightly ROM builds of CM10.1 would include Pie Controls. We have been a fan of Pie since we first saw it being used in Paranoid Android, so it made us happy to hear it was coming to the more widely-used CyanogenMod. To help show some folks how to enable Pie Controls and set them up, we put together this nice little video that you see below. 

The CyanogenMod team took to their Google+ page earlier, announcing that Pie Controls, a feature made popular in the Paranoid Android ROMs, would now be baked right into the CM10.1 nightlies.

Pie Controls are quick controls that are triggered by swiping on the display. While not in use, they are hidden, but with the quick swipe of a finger, you have access to settings, home buttons, or however you want to configure them for your device. 

Back in the summer of 2011, Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik took a software engineer job with Samsung, a move that many thought was a sign of the end of his increasingly popular CyanogenMod ROM. At the time, Steve assured the world that work on CM would continue, and sure enough, it has continued to thrive throughout his time at Android’s number one OEM. So how is his time at Samsung playing out? In a post last night on his Google+ account, Kondik made a new announcement (well, sort of) with regard to his status at Samsung, saying that he has left his job “but not because of anything in particular” and that Samsung was “great.” He’s looking to accomplish something new, which he may or may not have hinted as happening in a “couple of months.”