Cyanogen is working with Microsoft to deeply integrate Cortana into the next version of Cyanogen OS
David Gilbert / International Business Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This deepens a relationship that has been building all year: Microsoft took a minority stake in Cyanogen's $70M+ funding round in January, then in April signed on to bundle Bing, Skype, OneDrive, Outlook and Office natively into Cyanogen OS, with removable apps and contextual suggestions. The April app-integration deal was about replacing Google services piecemeal; this move goes further by putting Microsoft's assistant at the OS layer itself.
The stakes come from Cyanogen's founding pitch — an Android fork that can ship without Google apps, as planned for the Blu handset in its disruption roadmap. Embedding Cortana system-deep gives Microsoft what it cannot easily get on Google-certified Android: a default assistant position.
First-order effects
- Cortana moves from a bundled app to an operating-system-level service on Cyanogen devices, displacing Google Now as the default voice interface for users of those handsets.
Second-order effects
- Google faces a fork of its own OS distributing a rival assistant, pressuring it to defend its search-and-services defaults on non-Google Android builds; OEMs like Blu and the OnePlus One community get a Google-free stack that now includes an assistant.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Android forks become the distribution channel through which rival assistants reach phone users outside Google's control, turning the assistant layer — not the app list — into the new battleground for mobile defaults.
The trend: Mobile assistants are shifting from optional apps to contractually embedded OS defaults, with Microsoft using investments and partnerships to buy placement Google's certification rules deny it.