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Microsoft To Invest In Rogue Android Startup Cyanogen
An anonymous reader writes The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft plans to be a minority investor in a roughly $70 million round of equity financing for mobile startup Cyanogen Inc. Neither company is commenting on the plan but last week during a talk in San Francisco, Cyanogen's CEO said the company's goal was to "take Android away from Google." According to Bloomberg: "The talks illustrate how Microsoft is trying to get its applications and services on rival operating systems, which has been a tenet of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella. Microsoft has in the past complained that Google Inc., which manages Android, has blocked its programs from the operating system."
Because Chrome isn't a steaming pile of shit that constantly crashes while consuming all resources when it manages to run for longer than 30 seconds.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Why should things be any different this time?
Why is Snark Required?
Not always. Even cyanogenmod has abandoned many devices that could still be viable phones today. CM seems to focus mainly on the most popular phones for the latest releases, and in some cases, the devs for a particular make/model of device have just gone MIA, and development stagnates.
Success via Microsoft will not produce 'competition'. They're not getting 'free money'. It always comes with lots of strings.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
the real-world problems of trying to use a phone's flash to do Linux-style virtual memory
No Android device I'm aware of uses flash for swap. There are a small handful that swap to compressed RAM, the fast majority have no swap at all; when physical memory is exhausted something has to die.
(I work for Google, on the Android OS.)
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I think the idea is that Google, Samsung, Motorola, and HTC have all made themselves into a sort of cartel that don't allow the "open source project" to actually be a source of freedom for consumers. Cyanogen is "rogue" because it bucks that system and restores freedom to the project.
Not really. That may be the perception, but it's not true. Google is quite happy to see CM and similar third party ROMs flourish; this is part of why all Nexus devices are unlockable.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, and I work on Android, but I'm not a Google spokesperson and this is my opinion, not an official statement.)
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Microsoft has in the past complained that Google Inc., which manages Android, has blocked its programs from the operating system."
MS has a bunch of apps in the Play store. https://play.google.com/store/...
AFAIK, the only MS app Google has blocked was Microsoft's YouTube app, which violated the YouTube terms of service.
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No Android device running a stock carrier ROM ever used flash for swap (that I'm aware of), but ~2-3 years ago, just about everyone running Cyanogenmod (or some other AOSP-derived ROM) had swapfiles. And yes, we really DID destroy $80+ microSD cards. It caught almost everyone by surprise, because we all blindly believed the manufacturers' assertions that the flash would last "a lifetime of normal use", failing to note that manufacturers didn't consider paging virtual memory almost nonstop to be "normal use". It was literally a use case the manufacturers never designed for, that didn't even become *viable* until overclocked class 6 and class 10 microSD became fast enough to make swapping to it faster than killing & re-spawning activities.