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Cyanogen Inc. Turns Down Google, Seeing $1 Billion Valuation
An anonymous reader writes: According to a report at The Information (paywalled), Cyanogen Inc., the company trying to commercializa the popular CyanogenMod mobile OS based on Android, recently met with Google's Android chief to talk about an acquisition. The report says Cyanogen turned down Google's offer and instead seeks funding from investors and major tech companies at a valuation around $1 billion. "Cyanogen has told potential investors that it has a deal in place to bring its custom version of the Android OS to India through a manufacturer called Micromax. Alongside Samsung, Micromax currently holds almost as much share of the smartphone market in India, making this deal a very large step to get Cyanogen into the hands of millions of more people. Lastly, the report claims that Cyanogen should be wary of modifying Android too much. During the process, the company must continue to follow Google's compatibility requirements which ensure third-party applications will work on their devices. If those requirements are not met, devices will not be licensed to run Google's services, such as Google Play and other Google applications."
Google is just in a snit that CyanogenMod is fantastically better than stock android, BECAUSE it gives power back to users.
For instance, the power to rescind permissions on installed apps, the ability to have finer control over CPU throttles, and of course, the removal of bunches of total horse-shit that gets bundled.
Google is more worried that CyanogenMod being a mainstream thing will affect their ability to have baked in adware out of the box, generating money for them. Not that CyanogenMod devices will fail to run 3rd party apps.
"Oh noes! Dont allow users to use fake geolocation! That will ruin our datamining operations! Oh no! Not our playstore advert shit too!? Did you REALLY just give users the ability to say "NO" to that app maker's blanket permissions requirement AFTER they said yes initially to let it install!? How will Facebook get its hentai tentacles into users' contact lists!? That removes the "Our way or the highway" tactic from the table!! AHHH!"
Seriously-- this is SOP for big companies that have "disruptive" competition-- Attempt to buy them out.
Google is probably pretty steamed at getting hand slapped right about now, which is why they are brandishing their oh-so-special google services apps like a cudgel now.
CyanogenMod being open source, what is the value of such a company ? Once bought by Google, anybody could fork CyanogenMod...
but a billion for something that is just a 'piggie back' modification?
they should just kill themselves instead.
or someone could spend a few million to put a hit on the entire company and just steal their worthless IP.
You don't refuse an offer from the godfather to buy you out.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I remember Be Inc doing something similar when apple tried to buy them out. Worked out well for them didn't it?
Moral of the story, don't get greedy. Billion bucks is a lot of money, more than enough to start another 10-20 large companies.
When do they set up a "Cyanogen store"?
Even without Cyanogenmod, Android phones work just fine without Google services. At first power-up, there's a "sign up/log in" screen, with a "Later" option. Click "Later" and go on.
You can disable the "Google One-Time Startup" app to keep it from bothering you again.
Who would want to be bought by Google, only to be "destroyed" like so many promising companies' products have?
I now see that it's [not] always about the money.
Google are trying to protect their Android brand, from the reasonable accusations that hardware vendors leave their customers high-and-dry and stop supporting the handset when they have a new one to sell.
I don't want an iOS phone - *but* buying an Android phone for a similar chunk of cash, it never comes with any guarantee of a future update.
Google recognized this and released the 'google edition' versions of some of the high-end popular handsets. That ticks the box for the users of these phones - you're likely to get your updates for a good few more years, whatever your vendor does - but for most of these high-end phones the vendor provides upgrades anyway.
Surely what google want go do is provide some kind of ongoing support to their users of phones from the lower tier suppliers. Cyanogen is pretty good at bridging the gap between the huge numbers of phones out there, and google's latest and greatest OS.
The bit that niggles me is that I'm not quite sure what Cyanogen brings apart from providing a focus for the unpaid people actually doing the work.
If I were in Google's position I'd just pick up the community myself, and put bounties against phone/android version combos, and pay the devs directly.
It's trying to get its godawful greedy hands on anything that it sees as undercutting its hegemony.
I salute Cyanogen for their thumbing nose. I hope they can keep it up.
On a related matter -- Fed up with Google? Use http://startpage.com./
When Linux has made operating systems commodity?
Well, good luck. Maybe they'll get it. Seems rather far fetched to me.
Isn't Cyanomod open source? I might be missing something, but if Google buys it, can't it just be forked and have development on an OS more secure than Android continue?
I'm not an expert in these things, so I'm not sure, but that's how I thought it worked.
When you buy an open source OS, what are you really buying?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The whole point of CM is that it is NOT infested with Google, right?
The article doesn't state what Google's offer was. It could have been $1 million for all we know. Cyanogen Inc. *wishes* it were worth $1 billion, and hopes investors actually believe that and thus will pump money into their company, but its actual value is probably far, far short of that, and more in the realm of whatever Google offered. The question is how will Cyanogen monetize the version of Android it produces. Is Micromax going to pay Cyanogen for its version of Android? And if so why pay for what is already free (custom features, quality assurance, etc?)
Better known as 318230.
And verifying all of this would probably not be impossible. There are a few important things to take away from this. First, if you think you might be surveilled, try to collect some evidence of the fact. Second, only the government is interested in you in a personal sense — to Google you're just user number 1,409,0344,744. They are interested in whether their collective userbase finds their services to be useful, not whether you've been trash-talking Sergei Brin and the Obama Administration. Finally, if you are really concerned about your own privacy — despite being really uninteresting (I promise! I work for the NSA) — then you're pretty much going to need to roll your own infrastructure.
I wouldn't let google buy me out for a billion either.
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