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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.
The name is dead but the software itself isn't going anywhere. Ass kissing is only necessary to distribute Google Play Services (GPS)... a proprietary bundle of Google malware otherwise Android is open source and there isn't shit they can do about how you use it.
The only real competition Google has ever had with respect to GPS was from Amazon who operates their own app store separate from Google.
Personally I will never use an Android phone with Google Play Services installed. For me it isn't a choice between a custom mod and Google it is a choice between no GPS or nothing at all.
I hesitate at the word "chance". A lot of damn hard work went into breaking the IE monopoly.
New browsers such as Firefox and Chrome had to be built, which is quite difficult given the complexity of any web browser. But then they needed to gain traction, so the web standards problem had to be fixed... and the only player in the game, IE, refused to comply and seemed to even actively push against standards. 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. But the iPhone wouldn't have been special without reinventing how people interacted with smartphone devices, and mobile Safari would have been useless if data still cost $30 for the first 20MB.
Entire markets had to be reinvented just to break the IE monopoly. It was a huge undertaking, and might not have happened if IE, smart phones, or cellular providers were any more tolerable than they were at the time.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
companies like Samsung & etc.. and other hardware makers of Android phones made their own OS based on Linux. and it was a open source co-op method of development where everybody pitched in to develop the OS & apps so they can have something on their phones that was not controlled by another company
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Cyanogen Inc. had three paths to profit:
* Two paths with low-hanging fruit, but requiring hard work to yield near certain success -
Path A - Port CynogenMod to new platforms for pay
* Lowest risk, uses the skills and the community they already have
* Profitable from day one
* Takes a few years to grow to a meaningful size - like CyanogenMod!
Path B - Sell retail installation kits for "normal" mainstream people
* Requires hiring the right channel manager, spending money on advertising etc.
* An initial hit would make a pile of money, but future growth would require continuous innovation
* One path with high-risk high-return:
Path C - Sell CynogenMod Phones
* Requires starting a business using completely different skill-sets from that used to produce CyanogenMod, such as, cell-phone carrier sales, hardware quality assurance, world-class product design, electronics supply channel management, electronics design, manufacturing, etc.
* Piles of money to hire the right people, but with a return to justify the expense.
* The Cyanogen advantage would be having the best software, obtained by having the best developers, IF AND ONLY IF, they do not alienate said developers.
Cynogen went with Path C, without hiring the right people, and also ALIENED THE DEVELOPERS.
Follow-up attempts, to reinvent itself, involved neither fixing the mistakes for Path C, nor switching to Path A or Path B.
We survived the IE near-monopoly and ended up with a nearly-standardized web platform instead of the incompatible mess it was before
Sure, but it took twenty years, and everything is organizing under Google's banner. Even Firefox is practically indistinguishable from Chrome these days, and will be entirely so once they discontinue support for legacy plugins/addons. So instead of having Microsoft dictate terms through outright monopolization of the market, we're allowing Google to dictate terms because...... why? We trust them?
This is a matter of faith; we've traded monopoly for theology.
This is exactly it. Only I fear that this time the technical populace somehow thinks this is a Good Thing. Control by information companies is not any better than control by software companies, and in fact is almost certainly far worse for a whole host of Orwellian reasons.
We fought and fought and fought to remove IE's monopoly, but the biggest work overall was done by Apple. Remember when we wanted to break up Microsoft into an Office/Apps company and an OS company? It's hard to imagine that we shouldn't break Google up into an advertising company, a tech hosting company, a search company, a browser company, a mobile OS company, a cloud computing company, and half a dozen other distinct entities. But this time the Bay Area is fully behind unified, Umbrella Corp, control because "it's easier".
Read a book, guys. Learn your history.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,