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.

Comments

Not fooling anyone.

[msauve]

"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?

What they are saying is a removal of paternalism.

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:What they are saying is a removal of paternalis

[slaker]

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.