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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.
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/
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
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Android is open source and there isn't shit they can do about how you use it
Android is not open source. You have to be a major OEM (Samsung, HTC, etc.) and pay big, big money to get Android source code, as well as agree to bundle in (and pay separately for) other shit like Google's Play store and dozens of Google services and apps. If you want access to the latest and greatest <dessert name> version of Android you need to agree to launch a flagship product with it and advertise that version of Android as being the next coming of Christ Himself, etc.
AOSP is open source, and it's fucking useless to 99.999% of people. You can't legally get any of the Google apps on it, and going forward that includes all the baked-in but needlessly-separate features Android phones will have. See the Pixel for examples - the Assistant, the Launcher, the customization UI, etc.
Not only is AOSP bare and useless, it's often simply fucking broken. It gets lip service support from Google and "lol fuck you" support from hardware manufacturers. The only way to get a free and open and usable Android experience is to do so illegally - use AOSP and inject Google's apps and services, maybe grab some firmware or blobs for specific hardware so the damn thing charges properly or the WiFi actually works, hack some more shit to maybe get Android Pay working or get WiFi calling enabled, and illegally download and share the updated APKs whenever there's a security patch (often), then cry because you have to reformat your phone to flash a new ROM with the latest Android security updates every month because even when someone on XDA uploads an OTA differential patch for your phone it never works quite right.
Android is fucked up in many, many ways and Google is making it worse every day. They're becoming the walled garden of iOS without the garden.