In 2010, a year after cyanogenmod - a community developed after-market android firmware (ROM) came into existence; I told my friend that these guys are real deal & there will be a market for after market firmware in future & that we should enter the space as early as possible. (Obviously we regret for not entering the space).
In 2014, Cyanogen Inc. served as a model for commercialisation of an enthusiast product.
So what went wrong?
Enthusiast market share: 1 % of total android penetration enabled them to 115M $ in investments. Good money to build a quality product.
Exclusivity with Micromax: 'Greedy' as put by Indian High court, they went into exclusivity agreement with Micromax (South East Asia) & One Plus (Anywhere but Mainland China). Obviously got ditched by both and they ruined their reputation with manufacturers for unfair policies.
Community: They forgot their roots as a community contributed project. There were licensing issue to start with; Google sent Cease & Desist to stop cyanogenmod as it contained google apps (google search, gmail etc.) & after immense support from the community Google obliged to let cyanogenmod live on the condition of not bundling in proprietary Google apps.
When Cyanogen Inc. was announced, there were opposition from the same community which stood by cyanogenmod on the lines that developers who had provided their work in the past were not being appropriately acknowledged or compensated for their free work on what was now a commercial project.
On the other end of the community are the users who used cyanogenmod for it gave their android device a new lease of life free from usual bloat ware that the manufacturers included which robbed storage and battery. I vividly remember my first android device - a Huawei U8160 which came with android 2.1 & could be upgraded to 2.2 but cyanogenmod enabled me to install android 2.3 (gingerbread - First decent android release, still holds 1.2 % distribution). In-fact I bought the device for the very same reason that it could be unlocked and flashed with CM, I did it as soon as I received my order before I even put in the SIM card. The device enabled me to create wonderful apps which helped me get to where I am now. Cyanogenmod offered un paralleled customisability for their android devices from wallpapers to setting CPU frequencies, you name it.
But with Cyanogen Inc., they were forced to include 3rd party apps themselves which included True caller & apps from Microsoft, this totally went against the vision of cyanogenmod which Steve Kondik started.
Cyanogen OS vs cyanogenmod: So in many ways, Cyanogen OS which came pre-installed on their devices from the manufacturers isn’t really the same as the community developed & released versions. For starters, it included 3rd party apps and had slower release cycles, of course the device owner had the choice of installing community builds if they were upto to the task. It’s a chore for mainstream population which now had access to Cyanogen but it’s just not as good as the cyanogenmod which their geek friend had.
Google is the daddy: I really wonder whether Cyanogen Inc.’s ex CEO - Kirk McMaster knew where the base operating system source code for his CyanogenOS came from when he claimed his company was “putting a bullet through Google’s head” . Though cyanogenmod is a heavily modded version of Android, make no mistake in believing that it could exist without Google’s help.
Android operating system, though open source it’s build process is not community focussed like cyanogenmod. Google develops it in it’s infrastructure (it does take in suggestions, code from community every now and then) and releases the source code with every new version of android. Recently owning to security challenges, Google has implemented many security focussed features as encryption, SELinux etc. which makes it harder for the after market community such as CM to do what they have been doing & usually comes with a tradeoff with security.
Apps such as Android pay does not work with cyanogenmod or any aftermarket ROM and the device needs to be boot loader locked for it to work in it’s latest iteration sighting security reasons. Even apps like WhatsApp warn their users about not being officially supported when they use it in cyanogenmod.
A mainstream product like Cyanogen OS cannot balance security, stability and still cater to the enthusiasts who like customisation over anything else; especially when the core of the operating system is not even in their control. They work hard to bring the cyanogenmod to mainstream market as CyanogenOS but the moment they bring it to their customer’s device, Google would have likely announced the next version of their android and seamless updates are one of the features guaranteed by the Cyanogen team but excruciatingly hard to pull off without the support of Google.
Conclusion: I really wish cyanogenmod team has taken cues from how Red Hat, Canonical have created successful commercial products from open source Linux Operating System. They focussed on delivering niche services at the same time contributing to the community (Ubuntu?) and got rewarded for their activities.
It’s really sad to see CyanogenOS/cyanogenmod go, though they say that the community code can be forked into new projects it will be hard for cyanogenmod to raise from the dead. Founder, Steve Kondik has already started the open source Lineage OS distribution project which is said to take the place of cyanogenmod. I hope the mistakes learnt from CyanogenOS project is not repeated and I really wish to see a successful commercial product from an enthusiast project.
What do you think about Cyanogen, do you agree with what I had to say?
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Abishek Muthian, CEO of Timebender Technologies is a developer, enthusiast and researcher on computer technology