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Cyanogen Tackles How Developers Interact With Mobile Devices (sdtimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Cyanogen has announced a new integrated mobile platform designed to change the way users, developers, OEMs and MNOs build and interact with mobile devices. Their new platform MOD provides developers with APIs they can use to implement intelligent, contextually aware and lightweight experiences natively into the mobile operating system. It also allows users to extend the functionality of their devices.
"implement intelligent, contextually aware and lightweight experiences natively into the mobile operating system"
That came out of one of those technobabble generators, didn't it?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
intelligent, contextually aware and lightweight experiences natively into the mobile operating system.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I really really hate it when some group does things "for my own good" when I want the exact opposite. For instance I really hate the phone app on the iPhone. Yet I can't remove or improve upon it. I want fine grained control over what my apps have access to and what information they get from my phone.
For instance I don't only want to cut my apps off from access to things like my camera, phonebook, GPS, etc. But I want to lie to my apps about cutting them off. So the app will think that it has access to these things but will only have crap fed to it. This way the app can't even say, "I won't work without access."
I want a firewall on my phone that cuts off anyone I want including the device manufacturer.
I want to run apps in the background, or not.
I also want to install apps that the company really really really doesn't want me to. So adblocking is not something I want apple, or google to decide for me. Apple is sort of going in the correct direction but what if they change their mind under pressure from government or other large corps?
I also want the ability to have apps that really manage my communications. For instance when I tell the phone to silence a call then I want that person's calls silenced for a very long time, an hour, a day, etc.
Then we get things like the phone only remembering so many calls back. I want my phone to remember every call I have ever received. What kind of storage would that take? Not much.
I want to be able to easily record my calls. By default it would be nice to record them all and then at the end of the call say, "Erase"
I want to encrypt the shit out of my phone with no risk of a back door. I want whatever type of encryption I want.
Basically I want to actually own my phone.
"Even as they released their premium Cyanogen OS ROM for devices with proprietary extensions, the CyanogenMod ROM still stayed 100% open source."
That wasn't their original plan - but they realized after the Focal mess that trying to leverage your CLA to obtain dual-licensing rights to a GPL application that was written by an opensource contributor was a bad idea PR-wise. (Fortunately, their CLA didn't actually legally allow them to do what they wanted, and even if they did, that application was forked into CM directly from github without going through Gerrit and hence the CLA.)
I wouldn't say that until now the Cyngn team are really cool. The core team (who founded Cyngn) at one point went by the name "Team Douche" - and since the founding of Cyngn they've been pretty regularly living up to that name. Cyngn will always tell you that CyanogenMod is separate, but the reality is - All but 1-2 of those who have global +2 rights on the opensource project are employees of Cyngn. This is a fundamental conflict of interest, and it's clear that when it comes to corporate vs. community interests, corporate always takes precedence (see Launchergate)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As a bit of an aside to these comments...
I had a couple phones that I installed various releases of CyanogenMod on as soon as I got them. Those phones had pretty uniform experience, even between versions. Then I got Samsung phone that I just never bothered to root. I didn't like its dialer, but I assumed that was just the standard dialer application for that version of Android.
Then I got an LG phone. The Dialer was different from Samsung's and also from a Nexus phone, which finally gave me the "Eureka!" moment that dialers are a module component on Android. Five minutes later, I had disabled the existing LG dialer via ADB commands and installed the CyanogenMod Dialer I actually like.
I bring this up primarily because, in spite of being well aware that things like the Contacts, SMS Messaging and Calendar apps on Android devices are almost always vendor-supplied rather than a stock version, I had never considered that the Dialer would also be that way. Moreover, it's trivial to find an alternative if you don't like the one you were given.
iPhone users are of course still hosed if they don't like Apple's defaults, but they signed up for that the minute they bought a Fruit device.
These don't address the fundamental privacy issues related to the parent post, but once you've agreed to own a smartphone it's fairly clear that you're already giving up a huge chunk of your privacy no matter what you do.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Jezus timmy, how did it come to this?
The Cyanogen phone app has a really cool feature where it will do reverse look-ups on numbers that call you. It can usually identify numbers with the business/person name, so you can decide if you want to answer. I don't know what database it uses but it's really, really useful.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC