CyanogenMod Blog

Sigh, this whole Android is open or not argument is degenerating into the kind of arguments over 'Copyright infringement vs. Stealing'.

Here's one good solution, call the open Android as Androidium(on the lines of Chrome vs. Chromium).

Very good article on the openness of Android and to implement the above proposal.

http://marketingland.com/what-is-the-one-true-android-and-how-open-is-it-21664

>Some like to claim that since Google gives vendors early access to the source, this somehow makes it not open. For those releases, at that specific date in time, maybe so. But, the source is released and generally pretty soon after phones start shipping (honeycomb was a different story and Google's statements on the matter have been proven to be true with the new combined tablet and phone releases).

The problem came to fore when Acer got threatened with being cut off early access etc. when they wanted to launch other phones with Alibaba OS (Aliyun) on them. It's sort of a Android fork, but that's legal, but still Acer had to fold under the pressure or force getting cut off from their mobile business. Early access is much more important to OEMs than you make it seem to be and being able to fork is the core tenet of open source.

>Look, if android wasn't open source, projets like this would be a lot less successful: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

You know what, barely anyone would use CM if they couldn't get access to the Play Store and Google Apps like Map. So they download it…

Average Android user I would be skeptical about, but ones that frequent the forums generally know their own devices fairly well (many are former iPhone owners at some point or switch back and forth). However, I would say that many of them also take cheapshots at Apple to defend their own positions better by claiming things that are absolutely not true (e.g. Android gets similar battery life with the same battery capacity, Android performance with Dalvik/Java is as good as native performance on iOS, a 5+ inch phone is easy to hold [Note 2]).

Perhaps the most amusing thing I have heard are users that claim Android phones 2 years ago are as good as the iphone 5 is now. Perhaps if you rooted and installed Cyanogenmod[1] you got around a lot of the crap Android used to have or lacked and improved performance somewhat, but no way was the hardware or software of the Galaxy S or HTC Desire anywhere as good as the iPhone of today when it was stock.

Galaxy S for one had that horrible RFS proprietary filesystem that Samsung stuck on it and was a mess to try to use stock. The rooting/modding community would later fix that by formatting it to ext4 after some extensive work. One thing I can say about the Galaxy S though is its testament to stand up to time and still running the latest version of Android. You can grab a Galaxy S off ebay for well under $100 in great condition, root/unlock it and flash Cyanogenmod 10.1 on it (Android 4.2.1) and it runs quite well for 2.5 year old…

Here is CyanogenMod's Post: https://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/a-fork-in-the-road

All of this is so sad. At least for me.

I've used Steve Kondik's CyanogenMod on my ADP1 and have used CM until I got a Nexus 5. It was just so much better than anything the OEMs could produce at that time and had great customization features. Only Android 6.0 has stopped my yearning for CM. I think it had a profound impact on Android or at least it's technically oriented community. Even MIUI started as a CyanogenMod Mod, afaik, before Xiaomi even produced Android smartphones.

I couldn't understand the rage in the community when Steve wanted to create a business around CM and to this day think that their business model has only benefited CM. pfSense and nginx seem to do just fine with a similar approach.

Did Cyngn (Cyanogen Inc.) fuck up? Did Steve make mistakes along the way? Were his business partners toxic to the company and CM? - Probably yes and no to some degree to all of these questions but hey, it was mostly great I think.

Sad to see the company go and sad to see CM probably die slowly. At least in the form it exists in today. Hope dies last so I hope that CM will somehow survive...

"But it delivers few of the practical benefits that were meant to stem from the term (control of your devices/computer, the ability to modify the software you use)."

Of course it does. A lot of people I know run community mods of Android of their phones, or at least used to do so for a while. Cyanogen seems to be a popular choice: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

That some phone vendors choose to make it difficult to install your own version of Android is not the fault of Android. Maybe Android could have a license that forbids the practice, but it would be debatable if that would be more or less open. Also I'd argue that if you care enough to install your own custom OS, then you are likely able to figure out which phone to buy (ie Nexus One).

It seems however that the "only publish source code of releases" poses a problems for vendors considering releasing Android based hardware. It probably gives Google at least a little bit of leverage.

Which might be a good thing - most anti-Android people seem to complain that Google is not able to exert enough pressure on manufacturers to maintain quality standards.

The target has been reached. Two noteworthy comments from the post, in the order I saw them.

"I'm the MD of Bytemark Hosting in the UK, and noticed that you'd asked for donations for a CyanogenMod build farm. We have a few machines that would meet your requirements (or can easily upgrade a couple) and increasing numbers of our staff think it is a very cool project. [...] Please email me - matthew(at)bytemark.co.uk - and let us know what your ideal systems would be."
-- http://www.cyanogenmod.com/blog/cyanogenmod-needs-your-help#comment-442742735

"Thank you all! The goal has been reached after 8 hours!!! You guys rock! [...] For those of you who volunteered hardware/servers, should the donation drive prove to be insufficient, we ask that you post your email or other contact info in the comments."
-- http://www.cyanogenmod.com/blog/cyanogenmod-needs-your-help#comment-442909002

My favorite feature of Cyanogen now is that they have Whisperpush enabled by default, which secures all text communications from a Cyanogen phone to another or to a TextSecure app.

http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/whisperpush-secure-messaging-integration

I hope they will be willing to integrate RedPhone by default in it, too, eventually.

As someone who's more technical, I don't necessarily "need" Whisperpush, since I could just use TextSecure directly - however I think it's great that anyone who would be buying this phone would have secure communications by default (without even having to care about it - which is the brilliance of it), and the more people buy it the higher chance they will be communicating with a TextSecure user (or with another TextSecure federated client, since I think you can use the TextSecure protocol like you can with OTR).