How Cyanogen got started and its plans to disrupt Android, including upcoming first Cyanogen OS phone without Google apps from Blu
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google — It's a little hard to take Kirt McMaster seriously at first. Tweets: @mhelft and @bupbin . Thanks: @bupbin Tweets: @mhelft : Microsoft not investing in Cyanogen this time around, but looking to integrate Bing, Cortana and other services http://www.forbes.com/... Bruce Upbin / @bupbin : first real look inside Cyanogen, the mobile OS startup whose CEO wants to “put a bullet in Google's head” http://www.forbes.com/... Thanks: @bupbin
Context & Ripple Effects
By early 2015 Cyanogen had already made its ambitions explicit: a $70M+ round with Microsoft as minority investor and a CEO pledge to be fully independent from Google within three to five years, complete with its own app store. This Forbes profile adds the missing piece — distribution — with Blu lined up to ship the first Cyanogen OS handset that ships without any Google apps preinstalled.
First-order effects
- Blu gets a differentiator no other budget Android OEM has — a Google-free phone — while Google loses default-services placement on an entire shipped device line.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's minority stake plus its reported interest in wiring in Bing and Cortana gives Redmond a services-distribution channel on Android hardware that bypasses its own struggling phone platform.
- Other low-cost OEMs now face a pricing-and-terms decision: stay inside Google's app-bundle requirements or take Cyanogen's offer and swap Google defaults for Microsoft ones.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward Android fragmenting at the services layer rather than the kernel — third parties competing to own which apps ship by default. Whether that structure survives is genuinely uncertain: by December 2016 co-founder Steve Kondik had left, blaming CEO Kirt McMaster for the company's troubles and questioning CyanogenMod's future.
The trend: Android competition is migrating from the open-source OS itself to the proprietary services and app-store layer on top of it, with Microsoft bankrolling challengers to Google's defaults.