Many older Android enthusiasts who have ventured into rooting or ROMing in the past decade can look back with nostalgia for the Dirty Unicorns. Unfortunately, after today, all that will remain of the name are those memories, as Dirty Unicorns decided to close.
They say that all good things come to an end. I wish that wasn’t the case here.
Starting tomorrow, we will shut down our servers permanently. No, this is not a cry for donations or an April Fool’s joke. We decided to close our doors.
– Dirty Unic🦄rns (@_DirtyUnicorns_) March 15, 2021
This may be very old for many of our readers, but in 2012, Dirty Unicorns started out as an unnamed AOKP fork – another classic ROM that some may remember, and one of my favorites. This was during the Android 4.x / Jelly Bean era, when the Google platform was really growing, rooting on phones was an easy process and the ROMs had some unique and incredible features.
More recently, Dirty Unicorns has built a reputation for providing a kind of Pixel experience with steroids, and while it may never have been successful as long-time bigger ROMs like LineageOS (née CyanogenMod), it had loyal followers who persisted throughout the past decade. It was even one of my recommended ROMs when our beloved Nexus 6 missed official updates in 2017.
Unfortunately, less than a year after returning to XDA, the Dirty Unicorns day is over. The project announced that it will shut down its servers permanently from tomorrow. Dirty Unicorns’ Github will remain active, and new enterprising developers can feel free to base new ROMs on what’s there. But the almost old (in terms of Android) ROM is saying goodbye.
