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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.
Only instead of the carriers telling us what we can do with our phones, it's Google and Apple.
Goolge needs to ban carrier builds and let people update there os with out needing to wait for the carrier to do it.
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.
Unless you want to be accused of contributing the the Google-FUD, be sure to make mention of this whenever Cyanogen/CyanogenMod is mentioned:
https://github.com/LineageOS
http://lineageos.org/
No, they run OxygenOS.
http://lineageos.org/Yes-this-...
Why do they "need to"? You can buy a Pixel phone if you want an iPhone-like carrier free experience.
So CyanogenMod is only closing-down due to trademark stuffs surrounding Cyanogen. The actual OS is going to live on as LineageOS, still organized by Steve Kondik.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
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.
Over time, every human venture goes to a bad place. Why?
Because suddenly it has dependents, and those tend toward rent-seeking, and then that influences leadership to try to "keep the herd together" instead of admitting that it must cull the weak.
So now Google is an abusive monopolist because its leaders look out there, and see all those smiling hopeful faces, and realize they have to keep growing in order to keep everyone happy, even though that means (1) worse things for the consumer and (2) eventual doom.
They just can't stop themselves... ah well, it takes a tragedy for humans to learn, and even then, it only takes for awhile. If we filtered out the stupidity, we would be working 2-hour days and enjoying life, but why not suffer for the pretense of equality.
Alternative Right.
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.
http://lineageos.org/Yes-this-...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
The US is muddied with Sprint and Verizon's CDMA crap, but you can have universal US phones. The Nexus 6 is and example I still use. It works on any US carrier. You need a different model for good international support, but that's true for any radio device in the US vs the world. TV's just the same. It's a pain to near impossible to find a good cheap USB ASTC tuner for the US that supports Linux, but there seems to be swarms of DVB ones for the rest of the world. :(
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.
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.
> I mean Android is just a use of an OS kernel and some standard services, including application security, and some UI conventions.
And Google's very, very proprietary, non-opensource, and defacto-required (if you don't want your phone to be crippled) Google Play Services, which are required for installing apps from Google Play, using Google Maps, using Google-assisted location services, Google Pay, and plenty of other things. Over the past couple of years, Google has been systematically moving more and more of Android's core functionality into Google Play Services.
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?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Google won't do a damn thing to flex that muscle on something as simple as forcing the carriers to not stymie any updates.
You profoundly misunderstand the relationship between Google and the carriers.
Android exists as it does today so as to make the carriers feel safe. Safe that if Google screwed them in some way they'd have all the source to their OS and the expertise to carry on without Google. Google may have the $$$, but carriers own the wires, cables, poles, lines to your homes, cell towers and the agreements that allow them to exist, and the spectrums themselves. Android's entire business model was to be the anti-Apple. Worried about losing control of the devices on your network? We (Google) have a compromise! You own the software, you control the updates, and you decide what bloatware goes on the device. Carriers tell Google what to do, not the other way around. If Google tried to put the screws to the carriers, you'd start seeing Tizen / Baidu / Meemo / etc phones on their networks before you can blink an eye.
Google's model is one of education not coercion. Nexus (and Pixel) exist to show carriers and OEMs that a model of open software and updates will sell more devices. Think of them as a "best practice" in phones. You can choose to support this, or you can keep buying locked down phones from Verizon. Up to you.