As we all are familiar with CyanogenMod, an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets based on the Android mobile platform. It is developed as free and open source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added original and third-party code. It is based on a rolling release development model.
In past few months we have been hearing a lot from Cyanogen. In a statement, Kirt McMaster said that “We’re putting a bullet through Google’s head.”. Of course statement was not negligible and gave the first indication about its partnership with some other company. Cyanogen has finally confirmed and announced its new release with hardware partner BLU. This smartphone will have open source Cyanogen based Android OS. Cyanogen in this device has knocked out Google services.
Google is no doubt a free open source Android’s platform but the fact that manufactures using Google’s OS will have to use non removable Google’s services. Google pre installs its own App store- Google play, its browser- Google chrome, its Mapping system- Google Maps and much more. This sets a limitation for users as well as manufactures sometimes. To overcome this fact or in other words we can say in contrast to this fact, Cyanogen has decided to provide Android OS platform WITHOUT using and including Google services. As per the announcements and reports out, Cyanogen’s OS will use Amazon Store instead of Google Play Store, Opera Mini as default Browser instead of Google Chrome, Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive for cloud storage, Nokia Here for maps and Spotify for music consumption. It will also feature Bing for web searches and Microsoft’s Cortana for a voice assistance. Commenting on this BLU’s CEO, Samuel Ohev-Zion said that “When these other apps are deeply integrated into the phone, most of the time they perform better than the Google apps”.
This release by Amazon and BLU can change the entire scenario of Google’s Android Market. Company has raised a total sum of $110 million. In this total sum company has received $80 million in funding from Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm, Telefónica Ventures, Rupert Murdoch and several other big-name investors.