The folk behind the Android smartphone ROM replacement CyanogenMod have announced that they have incorporated to become a fully-fledged company; Cyanogen Inc. The team has raised around $7 million in backing in order to make this dream become a reality. The CyanogenMod ROM software will be relabelled as an “operating system” reflecting the scale of work done to create and maintain it.
The team and a dog
The serious business of transforming the group of hobbyist developers into a company really began in April this year when the fundraising was decided upon, big money backers lined up as partners and papers were signed. Since that time the CyanogenMod team “have been working tirelessly on what we think is the next mobile revolution”. The team has chosen today “to tell the world” of what they hope will be the future of the software project.
In a nutshell CyanogenMod’s history has been as an alternative Android ROM that smartphone users can install on their devices and gives a greater choice in the OS features and capabilities. It’s more open to user tinkering and can even provide a new lease of life to an otherwise moribund, neglected, not officially updated droid. I found this myself with an Android smartphone I bought several years ago, it never received a single official update to the Android OS it came from the manufacturer. However I managed to install a much newer, more fully featured and secure Android OS thanks to CyanogenMod team’s software.
Installing the mod currently requires a bit of technical jiggery pokery and is a little worrying with the warnings of ‘bricking’ your precious/expensive mobile always at the front of your mind. Thus one of the first efforts from Cyanogen Inc. will be an easy to use installer which “will be available on the Play Store in the coming weeks”. This new app will help simplify the current “hideous” and “daunting process for mere mortals”. The new installer promises to be both “easy and safe,” despite the aim of supporting “almost a hundred different devices”.
Simple and safe new installer app
Right now there are about eight million confirmed CyanogenMod users, the bulk of which are in China. Those figures only include people who chose the option to share such usage data, so the management team think the actual number of users could be triple that statistic.
As more than half of Android users are running and old version of the OS, for various reasons, there’s a lot of scope for user experience improvement on offer from Cyanogen Inc. However Google has opposed the CyanogenMod team in the past and issued a cease-and-desist letter as the team were bundling Google Apps. That challenge caused the user base to sky-rocket but it’s worrying that Google has been hobbling other user-friendly apps of late that stuck their toe in front of its efforts to maximise ad revenue from each and every user.
Cyanogen Inc is ambitious as a representative also stated that Windows Phone is in its sights and the team would like to claim official third place in mobile...
