back to article Microsoft set to penetrate Cyanogen, promises app-y ending

Perverse as it might seem for mighty Microsoft to be courting geek-niche Android developer Cyanogen, the inclusion of Microsoft Apps on future distributions of the Cyanogen flavour of Android is an important win for Microsoft. The deal has been a while coming. We reported in March that it was pending despite Microsoft having …

  1. Bob Vistakin
    Facepalm

    History is not on their side

    Here we go

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: History is not on their side

      Depends whether your strategy is to partner with partners or do the other thing people often do to their partners.

      Now boys and girls can we think of any reason Microsoft may wish to fragment the competing Android mobile phone market ?

    2. tekHedd

      Re: History is not on their side

      See also Microsoft/mono/Novell, and just about anything Microsoft has ever done.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: History is not on their side

      Dear me Bob. For you, this announcement must be like watching your girlfriend have a 'romantic liaison' with a kid who used to beat up on you at school. Awkward.

      1. Bob Vistakin
    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: History is not on their side

      Have we forgotten "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" so quickly?

  2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Wharever next?

    Adding Metro/modern/Tifkam as the UI?

    Joking aside, I am sure there are a lot of Android hackers who are rather sad at this and will be looking for an alternative.

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Gimp

      Re: Wharever next?

      I think that there's a subtle difference between Cyanogen OS, and Cyanogenmod. The former being an OS they try and push to OEMs and the latter being the open source version which you can install on your phone.

      I'm guessing that they won't be bundling Microsoft apps with the mod version, because pretty much everyone would be pissed off, but being open source, there'd be a version available with all the MS stuff stripped out within a day or two (there's a lot of unofficial ports of cyanogenmod).

      *edit: I've just had a thought; assuming that MS don't want to publish all those apps as open source code, they probably won't allow it to be included in the free cyanogenmod ROM. You already have to download the google apps separately (should you want them) for a fresh install.

      As for MS contributing to the code base, well, that depends on who at MS is doing the coding, sometimes they write good code, sometimes they write clippy. You never can tell.

    2. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: Wharever next?

      Sorry to reply to myself, but from this blog post:

      http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/microsoft-and-cm12-1-nightlies

      "We are not bundling or pre-installing Microsoft (or any Cyanogen OS exclusive partner apps) into CyanogenMod."

      People are still pissed off though.

  3. Matt Piechota

    Beware Microsoft bearing gifts.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Schultz
        Happy

        Beware Microsoft bearing gifts?

        The gift for Cyanogen comes in the form of little green pieces of paper. The stuff you can hand to programmers and they'll convert it into useful bits and bytes (or, as it happens, into Bing services, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Microsoft Office).

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Aslan

    As long as I can remove it,

    As long as I can remove Microsoft's applications, this is wonderful.

    1. silent_count

      Re: As long as I can remove it,

      Imagine if construction companies behaved like this.

      "Here's the new house you paid for. We've stuffed every room, floor to ceiling, full of garbage. Now instead of enjoying your purchase, you get to spend your time and energy doing unpaid cleaning work."

      Yet phone manufacturers, telcos, and in this case, phone OS writers seem to think what I've described is commendable business practice.

      1. druck Silver badge

        Re: As long as I can remove it,

        silent_count wrote:

        "Here's the new house you paid for. We've stuffed every room, floor to ceiling, full of garbage. Now instead of enjoying your purchase, you get to spend your time and energy doing unpaid cleaning work."

        Ever taken the side off the bath in a new house? Or opened up any other voids, such as under the stairs? It will be full of garbage the builders couldn't be arsed taking to the skip, and have just boarded up.

        1. silent_count

          Re: As long as I can remove it,

          Aye sir. My mother-in-law is building a house at the moment and, while her builders (friends of the family) have done a meticulous job, I know what you describe does happen. However it's not like it's standard practice for builders go looking for rubbish to fill up the client's house.

      2. MyffyW Silver badge

        Re: As long as I can remove it,

        @silent_count I think you might have described the PFI contracts we have for new public buildings in the UK.

      3. captain veg Silver badge

        Re: Imagine if construction companies behaved like this.

        Well, if in return for your unpaid cleaning work the purchase price of the house was reduced by a massive subsidy, would that be OK? Cos that's the only premise upon which telcos get to foist their crap on to your handset.

        -A.

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: As long as I can remove it,

      It should be an option on first run with a tickbox defaulted to 'no'. If 'yes' is ticked then the bloat should be downloaded.

      Having the bloat sitting there ready to install or pre-installed and running filling up parts of the system with God-knows what would mean their users would desert them.

  6. DrXym

    Cyanogen better be careful

    Goodwill could easily go flying out the window if they are seen to be fragmenting the platform for the sake of a hatful of money.

    1. MrWibble

      Re: Cyanogen better be careful

      Cyanogen's goodwill went out the window many months ago - when Kirk McMaster became CEO.

    2. P. Lee

      Re: Cyanogen better be careful

      >Goodwill could easily go flying out the window if they are seen to be fragmenting the platform for the sake of a hatful of money.

      MS are targeting google, not android. The aim is to get a decent android distro with MS apps, because MS has little hope of growing winphone. MS' problem is that if they don't have a foot on the client base, people will will care less about having Windows Servers. If MS doesn't have proprietary protocols in use which keep people happy, they will lose the market. MS want people on Android to be able to access their existing work environment, rather than allow some android dev (google) to drive a replacement of MS in the enterprise.

      MS is putting their apps on the dominant platform, which is fine. Cynaogen is probably ok in the medium term as I doubt MS will make many in-roads into mobile. If however, MS apps on android keep people on vanilla MS software and that drives winmobile sales, they're all outta luck.

  7. edge_e
    Facepalm

    "People around the world use Cyanogen's operating system XOR popular Microsoft services to engage with what matters most to them on their mobile devices,"

    Fixed it for you.

  8. Anonymous C0ward

    Investing

    What's 30 pieces of silver worth after 2000 years of inflation?

  9. MrDamage Silver badge
    Facepalm

    WTF?

    People tend to install Cyanogen in order to remove the bloated shite that comes preinstalled on the phones from Telcos/Manufacturers. Now MS want to have their bloated shiteware preinstalled on the option that people go for to get away from this behaviour?

    Is it just me, or is 2 tin scan connected by string becoming a very attractive mobile communication option?

    1. MrWibble

      Re: WTF?

      CyanogenMod won't be infected with this - only the "official" Cyanogen OS which is pre-installed on OnePlus and a couple of other phones.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google got themselves into this mess

    By being pretty hostile to Cyanogen and neglecting open source in general.

    As for Cyanogen their life expectancy got suddenly very short as they have to confront Google while at the same time having Microsoft patting their back to find a soft spot.

    1. DrXym

      Re: Google got themselves into this mess

      Google haven't been that hostile to Cyanogenmod. They told Cyanogenmod to stop distributing their apps in the image but that's about it. So now the CM kernel is Google apps free and you have to install gapps via a bootloader after flashing a phone. Slightly inconvenient but not hugely so.

      If Google really wanted to be hostile they could simply stop releasing Android source code, or dump it out as a monolithic tarball with no change history on a 6 month schedule.

      Anyway CM wouldn't be the first company to take a hatful of money from Microsoft and find out that they've done a very foolish thing. In this case it's likely MS bunged them cash simply to sour relations between CM and Google and fragment the android market. Google may well retaliate in ways as such as I described and everyone will be the poorer for it. And I suspect that's Microsoft's goal all along.

  11. Jonathan 27

    Sounds like Microsoft is going to "buy 'em out", in the style of Bill Gates on The Simpsons.

  12. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Bloatware

    Let's talk bloatware for a little while, before shunting back to topic.

    I own two Samsung phones. My first is the venerable Galaxy S, which, until a month ago, ran stock Android. I decided to take the plunge into modding and plonked Cyanogenmod on it.

    It ran beautifully, all the stock bloatware was gone, and battery life improved by 50%.

    My second, the Galaxy 3 Mini (GT-i8200) still is running stock Android and we hateses it, we hateses it, we hateses it forever. No way of getting rid of unwanted bloat, and there is no easy way to upgrade it to the latest and newest Android... Add to that, some simple charger circuit woes, and I have decided to shaft Samsung and buy something else the next time I'm due for an upgrade. Adding to my woes is the unavailability of a Cyanogenmod ROM for this phone.... but rest assured, as soon as the ROM is available, I'm so going to root it.

    So... in the end unwanted bloatware does not endear to end users, who will simply detest it as it just chomps the battery, causing the end user to charge more frequently, causing you to put a little more strain on the electrical grid...

    As the one poster up above said :

    "It should be an option on first run with a tickbox defaulted to 'no'. If 'yes' is ticked then the bloat should be downloaded."

    Make it a default option for users, the user will decide whether bloat be installed or not, NOT the manufacturer. Power users do not need bloat. Finish en klaar.

    Now, back to the topic - if Microsoft make their [-]apps[/-]bloatware available via the Play store, then we can decide yea or nay, and it will be providing more realistic statistics as to the popularity of their apps.

    Not for me, I think. Thanks, but no thanks, I'll stick with OpenOffice and stuff I know. Don't need paperclip-wielding daemons to haunt my documents etc at all... The smaller (and simpler) the office app, the better. Heck, you will only need left/right/middle justify, bold, italics, underline, various fonts, font colours for a basic document as it is virtually impossible to type up a 10 (let alone a 100) page report on a cellphone before cramping of the fingers set in.

    Leave the 10 (and 100 or 1000) page documents for laptops/desktops with proper word processors.

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