Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'd like to see Cyanogen succeed because the more competition there is in the smartphone market, the more companies will be pressured to develop new, useful features.
I bought my first smartphone two years ago last month. It's a Samsung Galaxy S III. It still works great, despite some quirks. I felt like with the Galaxy S III, the smartphone was beginning to take a quantum leap forward in features. Especially for the last year, though, it seems like there isn't much to crow about except for some fingerprint functionality nobody uses. Phones are getting a bit more memory, somewhat faster CPUs, a bit better screens, and improved cameras but you would expect all of these things. In terms of new and interesting features, it seems like we're in a mature market where we've all decided upon what it means for a device to be a smartphone.
Perhaps Cyanogen will bring some excitement back. At worst, they'll come up with some new ideas that Samsung can license or copy. I'm using Samsung as an example, but I could be talking about HTC or one of the Chinese startups. I don't see a whole lot to distinguish current smartphones (except that Samsung does not permanently glue batteries inside of its products).
Is Microsoft preparing a Plan B for when they finally give up on Windows Mobile?
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.
Yes, it seems like most phones are abandoned by cyanogenmod at about the same time the manufacturer does. Certainly, this was the case Mytouch 4G/HTC Glacier. The last manufacturer release (less than a year after I bought the phone) was Gingerbread. The last Cyanogenmod: also Gingerbread.
They're good with Google's phones and the most popular Samsung phones but anything else is a gamble even if it is supported at the time you buy the phone.
Additionally, I personally would argue that from a OMG UNIX has conquered the world perspective that Android == Linux as little as Mac OS X == NetBSD since all the parts that people care about are derivative or proprietary.
That isn't true of Android. Sure, if you're writing in Java the *nix-ness is all abstracted away behind the JVM, but if you choose to write native code, you find yourself right back in Linux-land. There are some oddities, of course, like the assignment of UIDs to apps, rather than users. And starting with Lollipop, SELinux is used to block app native code access to many parts of the system (e.g. you can't go looking around in /proc to find out what else is running). But it's definitely still Linux.
It's not true of OS X, either. Again, there are lots of new APIs layered on top, but it's still very clearly Unix. Maybe you meant iOS, not OS X. In that case, I don't know if you're right or not because I've never worked in iOS.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
So, Cyanogenmod devs will support what strikes their fancy. And if they are no longer interested in a device, it won't be supported any longer. Now if they get financing, maybe this will change as most consumers want some stability and continued support. It is one of the things that could differentiate itself from the phone makers... if they care to. If not, in this regard they won't be any different. And it would be a shame since it is nice to get rid of bloatware.
The vast majority of people will not port their own devices. They either don't have the time or the technical know-how or nether. I will use the stock OS if it isn't available as a stable CM. In fact I do with my P600 Samsung Note. But even if they did, after reading that sticky from the forum, I am less willing to adopt CM and choose to just root the device instead.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The problem is that unlike on the desktop, the display subsystem on many devices is more than just the GPU. Also, the subcomponents of the display subsystem interact with other subcomponents in such a way that if an OEM makes changes, those changes ripple throughout the whole subsystem.
The end result is that if one component of the display subsystem (and this includes the camera, since it has hooks into the display subsystem to handle preview and such) is closed-source and deviates from the reference implementation for that platform, it's a nightmare of reverse engineering to get the other components open-sourced.
That's why, for example, most of the original CyanogenMod maintainers for Samsung Exynos4 devices ditched the platform. Samsung had reference source at Insignal, but it was vastly outdated (Their "ICS" source had significant architectural components that dated back to Gingerbread) and didn't even remotely match what ANY OEM used (Samsung's own handsets did NOT use the "gingerbready" components referenced previously). Getting that source usable with any real device was a nightmare. The kernel wasn't the issue, it was all of the HAL stuff - hwcomposer/gralloc/etc - especially hwcomposer.
Cyngn (the abbreviation I use to refer to Cyanogen Inc) does have access to all the proprietary goodies that should allow them to support a device very well, but so far, their track record has been to do no better than the OEMs they claim to be trying to provide an alternative.
Oppo N1 - didn't receive KitKat OTA until November 2014, 1 year after KK was released. Epic fail. Yeah, there were CM11 nightlies, but Cyngn staff will aggressively remind you that community builds (including CM nightlies) are NOT supported
OnePlus One - Their current state is "average" - many OEMs upated to Lollipop within a month of Google releasing it, Cyngn is at 3 months and counting.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
AOSP?
Omni? (I'm biased here - the history is that it was founded by a number of Cyanogenmod maintainers that left as a result of the Focal fiasco. However I'll be honest, a lot of the developers have burned out and as a result we're really behind on a lot of things...)
Some of the Omni guys along with people from EOS and Slim are talking about forming a project that is strictly limited in focus to hardware support. Some of the ex-Gummy guys already formed such a project (AOD) but a number of people (including myself) are holding back because they kind of rushed things - starting to code without planning the project, while the challenge of such a project is planning and organization/politics. Screw up the planning and organization/politics and best case is that you wind up "just another ROM".
AOKP is dead due to Cyngn hiring Roman
Same for ChameleonOS
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
True. But how vital is the specific kernel version to the upgrade from, say, Kit-Kat to Jellybean? Google goes with a new kernel for support for new devices - and to otherwise keep up-to-date. But couldn't the AOSP source code to Kit-Kat or Lollipop be built against the kernel used in Jellybean to get a CM ROM that has all the features of the latest Android - but works on otherwise abandoned hardware, using the binary drivers that were produced for that hardware.
There might even be a cash business for such a service. OEM's abandoned your otherwise viable device? Pay us 10 bucks and we'll upgrade you. Beats having to buy a new phone.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...