Everybody knows by now that Kirk McMaster – CEO at Cyanogen, Inc. – likes to talk big. He was saying a few months back that he was ready to “put a bullet through Google’s head” and that Cyanogen was going to “take Android away from Google“. All the bluster aside, this CEO has raised a good amount of venture capital, and has put Cyanogen in the hands of millions of customers around the globe. The endgame for him is to make the “next big smartphone OS”.
If you’re an avid reader of all things Android or a power Android user, they you will know of Cyanogen. If not, then you should know that it started with developing a custom Android ROM that had power tweaks and could give you better features than what stock Android could give – and they called that CyanogenMod. In 2013, Cyanogen, Inc. was created and in 2015, here’s McMaster trying to break the duopoly of Google and Apple. His latest partnership is with a European brand called WileyFox which will launch smartphones all over Europe with Cyanogen OS out of the box.
McMaster is fairly confident that next year, people will start seeing big things from the Cyanogen operating system project. He admits that Cyanogen needs to be able to offer what the big guns (Samsung, Apple, HTC, LG, etc.) already do and jump from there. One of his greatest coups is to get Microsoft on his team, and with that, full integration of Microsoft’s popular digital assistant Cortana into Cyanogen.
“Ultimately if you are going into the mass market, when you consider the iPhone and Apple’s marketing budget, you have to have signature experiences that really stand out and you are going to see some of these things from us by late Q2, early Q3 of next year,” McMaster says. The goal for Cyanogen, he says, is to offer an OS that has “no dependencies on Google” which he hopes will happen in the next 2 or 3 years.
VIA: IBTimes
Should be the poster child for tech companies that had their original success go to their heads. Only reason I ever touched Cyanogen was on devices that were never going to get a manufacture update. It was still Android, It was still Google at heart – another Mod will just take their place.
So Cyanogen is going to remove dependence on Google’s ecosystem and replace it with its own M$/Cyanogen version. But where is the value proposition for the consumer? Google’s ecosystem has best of breed in almost every category and its open. I am not seeing why I would want this.
If he wants to have his OS with no dependencies with Google, he should rewrite his OS from scratch, and not base or derive his OS from Android source code. I feel ashamed that he’s talking a lot of bad things about Google yet he relies from Google’s Android to come up with his own OS.
So he’s going to replace Google’s apps with the enemy of Linux’s apps. Right…
McMaster wants Cyanogen OS really open. Android is not as open as some people think – no matter which Android device you buy, you’ll always will need to create a Google account. If you don’t like Google Now, you will be obligated to like, because you will never allowed to uninstall it and replace with other. The same can be said of every Google app. That’s what McMaster promises to deliver – an OS that allows you choose whatever you want as standard. Cyanogen OS will come with Cortana. What, you don’t like it? Ok, uninstall Cortana, go to the app store, download what you like the most and make it standard.
I like that idea