With Cyanogen Dead, Google's Control Over Android Is Tighter Than Ever (greenbot.com)

Last week, Cyanogen Inc announced it is shutting down all its services. A day later, CyanogenMod announced that it is going away too. Regardless of how you found Cyanogen's commercial operating system or open source fork CyanogenMod, the demise has bigger implications. From a report on GreenBot: Cyanogen might never have seriously threatened to take control of Android, but the upstart's shutdown still represents a major victory for Google. As Google showed with the launch of the Pixel, the company is taking steps to ensure no one ever gets close to stealing Android's soul ever again. [...] In many ways, Cyanogen encapsulated more of the spirit of Google's mobile OS project than Android itself ever did. As an early offshoot of the mainstream project designed and supported by habitual modders, Cyanogen was in many ways more aligned with the iOS jailbreaking community than Android proper, bringing customization and features far beyond those available in the stock OS. But almost as quickly as Android took off, Google began reining it in. By implementing stricter rules for manufacturers to prevent further fragmentation -- including licensing of its apps and mandatory inclusion of its search bar widget -- Google actively worked to keep deviant versions of Android on the fringes. Nonetheless, CyanogenMod persisted, surviving cease-and-desist orders, takeover rumors and general Google-led consternation. And now it's all over. Google won, not by waging war with Cyanogen but by doubling down on its own vision, forging partnerships with manufacturers, and working to ensure that Google's Android remained the world's Android.

Comments

Goolge needs to ban carrier builds and let people

[Joe_Dragon]

Goolge needs to ban carrier builds and let people update there os with out needing to wait for the carrier to do it.

Crackpot

[Luthair]

Despite the CEO of cyanogen claiming they were taking away Android from Google, they were always irrelevant. They may have had a few wins with minor players consumers had no relevance with consumers and were never going to replace Google services.

Re:Goolge needs to ban carrier builds and let peop

[Solandri]

Then Android wouldn't be open source anymore. Which do you want? An OS which is open and that anyone can fork and modify if they don't like how the original author made it? Or an OS which is closed and proprietary so you have to take it the way the original author made it, no alterations?

Way I see it, the carrier problem isn't Google's responsibility. It's a market problem - vertical integration causing lack of customer fluidity. The carriers own the towers, the service, and also sell the phones. GSM tackled the problem by requiring SIM cards, basically forcing all phones to be interchangeable between carriers. The U.S. doesn't have that so your phone is frequently tied to your carrier, giving them an unprecedented level of control over your phone.

But will the OEMs still control security patching?

[QuietLagoon]

So long as the OEMs continue to control whether or not, and when, security patches are installed, Google can claim all the control they want. But they do not have that control. Android customers are left in the lurch, subject to the whims of the OEMs and to security issues from unpatched vulnerabilities.

Re: No basis in reality

[BellyJelly]

Check out the F-Droid store. K9mail for email, OsmAnd~ for mapping/navigation, firefox, vlc, Face Slim if you really must use facebook. Not using google play store and the related services does wonders for your battery life. It's perfectly feasible to run a productively useful yet google-free android phone.

Who Wrote this?

[jdkc4d]

I really just want to write "WRONG" as the entire content of this post and just leave it at that. The article seems to have some of the facts, but not all. Yes, Cyanogen the company has decided to shut down. And CyanogenMod, the open source version of the OS released by Cyanogen based on Android also decided to change their name because they don't want to get sued. But facts seem to end there. CM will continue on under another name. If you are running CM on any of your devices, rest assured, aside from a name change, the next build will be more of the same.
Where I am getting frustrated with this article is the notion that this is a big win for Google. I have to disagree. Google or alphabet or whatever they want to call themselves may have created the android OS, but they release it in an open source format. They do this to get it out there on as many devices as they can. More importantly, they do this to get it into the hands of as many developers as they can. There are a number of things that I actually thought were part of android, that only later when reading stock android was adding certain features did I realize were actually only part of CM. That's really what open source is about, the ability for a wide variety of people to work to better something together. A lot of times things seem to make sense when one person is working on them, but later we come to find out that they don't make sense to others.
If Google actually wanted to rein in android, they would simply retool with proprietary code, and release the next version of their OS closed source. The only thing they actually seem to be concerned with are phones that are still running old versions of the OS. This makes is hard not for them, but for application developers to support their applications in that ecosystem. We have seen Google take steps in the recent year or two to modularize some of the core components of Android so that those pieces can be updated even if the OS itself has not been.

Re:We are back to square one

[Kjella]

But then to fix the web required a third-party browser to already exist that adhered to standards to gain marketshare, which came in the form of mobile Safari on the iPhone.

Stop licking Steve Jobs' butt, he did enough without making shit up. Peak IE was around 2004 with 95% market share. In mid-2007 when the first generation iPhone launched it was already down to around 80%, that is non-IE share had quadrupled and the monopoly was cracking all over. The market for $399+ smartphones was nothing compared to the many hundreds of millions of computers in use, the first sign of mobile browsing having any more than a token presence was in 2010 (went from 1.3% to 4.1% that year, according to StatCounter) when IE was down to 60%. The iPhone had absolutely nothing to do with the fall of IE.

Re:What's wrong with Android uniformity?

[presidenteloco]

Ok but for the sake of argument, other than the following factors:

1) Name recognition and reputation
2) Resources and ability to write good quality software and maintain good databases with quality data (e.g. maps database, wifi IDs database)

Is there anything stopping open organization SPQR from creating

SPQR App Services for Android

and offering equivalents to the Google-branded services?

If resourceful, SPQR could convince phone makers to pre-load their phones with the SPQR app store and services.

My devil's advocate question is: Is this just jealousy that Google out-innovated and out-standardized others, and out-"take my free stuff"-offered others, creating a de-facto monopoly?

Is this just bitterness that the network effect (on adoption) is the network effect, and it's tough to compete with after a while?

Seriously, if there is a strong will (including possibly distributed financial backing) to have a good quality open alternative to Google services on Android, couldn't that be done in theory? There's nothing license-wise or artificial-technical-barrier preventing it, is there?