I remember a time when apparently you could just navigate to get.cm on your phone and it would download an .apk specific to your phone which would perform the rooting/unlocking and install of cyanogenmod. But that effort seems to have failed. http://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-install-cyanogenmod/

It may be intrinsically hard. The one time I installed Cyanogenmod, I rooted the phone thanks to a misconfiguration resulting in local privilege escalation. Now, if only the phone manufacturer or the carrier cared to close this vuln with an OTA... Cyanogen could find themselves in a security arms race, where they are the attackers. I don't even know if that wouldn't make it illegal to sell their kits in some countries.

I wrote something a while back that did this as a proof of concept/learning exercise... but it never took off:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2391493

Hey tire!

I've been wanting to do something like that for a long time, get away from the recoveries and politics of the different factions. Make something a user can just pick up an old device, run an install process, and have a fast new OS.

Google of course doesn't make it easy, mostly due to carrier and manufacturer demands. But also due to the lack of a defined ABI between the user interactive parts and the libraries for talking to hardware.

There's really no reason an operating environment couldn't be compiled for ARM and run on the majority of devices if this specification was enforced. I'm looking to gonk and a new Google initiative as a possible solution.

I think it is just a hard problem. Many devices with many Android versions and many provider customizations. And, oh yeah, the carriers are often going out of their way to make rooting as impossible as they can. Screw up badly enough and you can easily brick a phone.

They had 136 people. Solving the hard problems is what makes companies successful and what proprietary companies are good at, or so I'm always told. All the information you need exists on the Cyanogenmod wiki pages, it's a matter of grinding that into code.