Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Cyanogen has a chance to snag as many as 1 billion handsets, more than the total number of iPhones sold to date, according to some analysts. Fifty million people already run Cyanogen on their phones, the company says. Most went through the hours-long process of erasing an Android phone and rebooting it with Cyanogen. [Kirt] McMaster is now persuading a growing list of phone manufacturers to make devices with Cyanogen built in, rather than Google’s Android. Their phones are selling out in record time. Analysts say each phone could bring Cyanogen a minimum of $10 in revenue and perhaps much more."
Posted Mar 24, 2015 22:31 UTC (Tue)
by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
[Link] (2 responses)
I'm using CyanogenMod since some years. Of course, without any proprietary apps from Google nor anyone else. F-Droid.org is sufficient for me.
But Android is in many aspects so horrible compared to classic Linux. If there were a telephone friendly UI on top of Debian (or any other standard distro), how great would that be...
Posted Mar 24, 2015 23:17 UTC (Tue)
by The_Barbarian (guest, #48152)
[Link]
Posted Mar 25, 2015 2:04 UTC (Wed)
by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
Unfortunately the hardware support in mainline Linux probably won't allow you to run Debian/etc on most devices and probably the particular Android fork of Linux for your device will never get updated and probably introduces some security issues or other bugs in new driver code. That is changing slowly and the N900 and GTA04 appear to be best supported in mainline. I'm betting the Neo900 will be the best mobile device for Free Software distribution enthusiasts once there are enough pre-orders.
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/12/03/debian-mobile/
In terms of telephony middleware there are FSO (recently seeing a revival) and oFono. In terms of finger-friendly UIs there are SHR, QtMoko and others.
https://github.com/freesmartphone/
Posted Mar 24, 2015 22:35 UTC (Tue)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (6 responses)
Most of the angst over Android versionitis has also passed now that >=4.x has majority marketshare position. Samsung is dialing back on its skinning...the Android world is slowly but surely making real progress.
Cyanogen seems to already lost some of its cred over its dealings with some vendors...I really can't see a compelling reason why I should jump out of the Google ecosystem for them.
Posted Mar 24, 2015 23:27 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (5 responses)
Surely you meant s/but/and/ there. They've moved a lot of functionality out of *AOSP* and into a proprietary binary that cannot legally be bundled with AOSP, which many FOSS projects aren't aware of; it's IE and ActiveX all over again.
The fact that it keeps life support on for bad OEMs is convenient PR for them, but not the main intent of the move.
Posted Mar 25, 2015 5:09 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (3 responses)
The loss in functionality is not that great. It does exist and it does make it painful from a usability point of view, especially when it comes to certain applications, but the most important bits are arlready replacable by open source alternatives. At least for my purposes, which is mostly the location services.
If people in the Free Software community is really interested in Free Software phone then Replicant, or a similar approach, is going to be the path that leads to success.
The fact that I can run a almost-complete Linux desktop with X11 support in Android using chroot'd installs of Debian or Arch Linux with about a half hour of effort goes to show that it's still Linux. It's still all there if you want it. Traditional Linux environments and Android are not mutually exclusive things... just a bit strange and irritating at times.
It would be awesome at some point in the future that Linux kernel could be used to create containers in different OS personalities.
Posted Mar 25, 2015 13:42 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (2 responses)
(1) an actual native X server based on SDL, written by a Russian guy with the handle pelya. It works, but it doesn't run as a "service" (unlike many other unix-friendly programs like the most popular terminal emulator) and therefore is liable to be killed by Android randomly, destroying your entire session, unless you live your life in there. I have tried cron-jobs to renice it, reset its oom priority, etc, no luck. I have filed a bug report suggesting it register a "service" to stop itself being killed, no luck. I don't have the skills to fix this myself.
A virtual-framebuffer-based desktop viewed via VNC. It works as long as you don't want any sort of animation. The pluspoint is that apparently unix processes, including the VNC server (I use x11vnc), are not killed by the android OOM killer and not even killed under spontaneous reboots -- I have had my device reboot spontaneously (some ROM bug I suppose) and when I tried to view my desktop it was still there. I do get serious work done that way.
Nevertheless, I think this is only for nerds like you or me -- Google has zero interest in making it better, Ubuntu had an "ubuntu on android" project that died long ago, and Android Marshmallow (or whatever M is called) could easily end up breaking all of it. There is a valid concern here.
Posted Mar 25, 2015 14:31 UTC (Wed)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 25, 2015 15:30 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link]
Posted Mar 25, 2015 16:50 UTC (Wed)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link]
Furthermore, none of your qualms are addressed by Cynaogen...they seem uninterested in libre software
Posted Mar 25, 2015 2:13 UTC (Wed)
by st (guest, #96477)
[Link] (2 responses)
Does anyone else feel that Cyanogen has gone in a direction that is more for the benefit of vendors who are competing with Google than it is for the benefit of actual users?
Posted Mar 25, 2015 6:32 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (1 responses)
Conceivably a similar setup could be used for virtual machines to talk to other VMs on the same supervisor, where the virtual network interface has no risk of eavesdropping or MITM (unless deliberately configured to do so by the machine's owner). You might not want to do it on Microsoft Azure, but for your own compute farm it could be handy.
Posted Mar 25, 2015 6:33 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 20:48 UTC (Thu)
by karim (subscriber, #114)
[Link]
There are a number of reasons why Google will likely continue to steer Android for the time being:
From the OSS standpoint, unconventional as Android may be, I can't think of any OSS fork that has overtaken the parent without speeding passed it. I don't see how CM creates an equation where it achieves that given the above.
From a commercial standpoint, I don't see how CM ever makes VC-grade money. It may appeal to certain parties that want to waive a "we could always switch to $OTHER_OS" banner, but that's not a business model. It needs to show non-linear adoption with proportional, non-insignificant conversion ratios. I don't see the non-linear adoption nor what CM converts users to.
As an "Android for power users" and a lifestyle business, though, it makes perfect sense.
If Android would only a little bit better,
If Android would only a little bit better,
If Android would only a little bit better,
https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
http://elinux.org/N900
http://gta04.org/
http://neo900.org/
http://shr-project.org/
http://qtmoko.sourceforge.net/
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
The fact that I can run a almost-complete Linux desktop with X11 support in Android using chroot'd installs of Debian or Arch Linux with about a half hour of effort goes to show that it's still Linux. It's still all there if you want it. Traditional Linux environments and Android are not mutually exclusive things... just a bit strange and irritating at times.
I do that too. The "X11 support" is misleading -- as far as I can tell, you have two options.
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google (Forbes)
1. It started the project
2. It has a very large team working on it full time
3. The HW ecosystem perceives it as the authority wrt Android
4. It owns the main Android app ecosystem (users see it as the authority)
5. All developers abide by its API definitions (developers see it as the authority)