Wow, pretty cool newsā¦
I donāt suppose anybodyās sold new phones running CM yet? I wonder how far off that day is.
And when it happens, I guess it wonāt be long before having CM on your phone is worth 0 nerd pointsā¦
Thatāll be sad.
Hm, now I read Kondikās postā¦
Our installer will be available on the Play Store in the coming weeks.
I know thatās awesome news, but it still kinda bums me out.
I like the install process to be convoluted and arcaneā¦ not that itād make any sense whatsoever to do it the hard way once the easy way exists : (
What Iād really like to see from CyanogenMod, is a list of features. Particularly how they differ from standard Android and major manufacturer versions (the Galaxy S4 has a few special features Iām interested in).
Also, using the word ROM instead of OS, distribution or firmware still hurts. Can people please stop doing that?
The loader in the play store is pretty amazing, honestly I am very interested in this to get away from the T-mobile bloatware. I along with the above poster would love to have the community start talking about loading operating systems onto our smart phones and not āflashing romsā once I figured out what was really happening, I was pretty amused at the use of ālegacy terms.ā
Yeah, if you read the whole website hoping for a bullet point list and some links to screenshots of the improvements over stock android you will be disappointed, I was; the only things that seem definite are an eq for the audio out, and open source.
What has always surprised me a bit about CM (or, perhaps more accurately, about dodgy pacific rim export outfits) is that I donāt think Iāve ever seen a mystery-brand Android phone/tablet/HDMI-stick-thing sell with, or aggressively advertise the ability to easily flash, CM.
With routers, now, you do actually see (some, mostly geek-oriented) brands and models that, even on their retail boxes, advertise DD-WRT compatibility (as an OpenWRT partisan, this somewhat annoys me; but thatās arcane holy war stuff).
Given the razor-thin margins in the competitive field for no-brand Android devices of middling spec, and the fairly painful average quality of no-brand Android stock ROMs, I would have expected that a fairly natural business opportunity would exist in veryifying the compatibility of a set of these mystery devices with CM, and then either flashing them or providing instructions on doing so(along with assurance that the device you buy wonāt be a totally different chipset in the same case), in exchange for a modest (but significant relative to the margins elsewhere) markup. Maybe I just suck at looking; but Iāve been surprised not to see such a thing.
[quote=āmcv, post:3, topic:10159, full:trueā]Also, using the word ROM instead of OS, distribution or firmware still hurts. Can people please stop doing that?
[/quote]Yes, much of the alternative Android scene has a PR problem. They seem to be going out of their way to sound like teenage copyright infringers from the nineties.
You think the alternative Android scene is all that interested in PR?
AFAIK theyāre more concerned about nice code and impressing their peers.
I seem to recall that at least some of them are going commercial.
Yeah, I think āat least someā = stuff-all /= āmuch of the ā¦ sceneā
I have a crappy Maylong M150 tablet I hardly use. I wonder if Cyanogen would run on it?
Well crap, now I have to go RTFA, because I donāt understand how one can install CM from the Play Store (since it requires pretty low level access to the phone).
Edit: and dammit, they donāt talk about how theyāre going to do it. Of course.
Thereās currently over 7 million devices running Cyanogenmod, and I believe this excludes those that refuse to share their usage data (like myself). Now, Iām not entirely familiar with marketshares and whatnot, but that does strike me as pretty significant when you consider the steps required to install a custom ROM, and that they choose to install CM instead of the various other ROMs.
Now of course, youāll get device testers or people that branch out from CM running multiple devices, so 7 million + isnāt an entirely accurate picture either. My brother, for one, installed CM on all of his devices.
So thereās the user vs install difference to be noted too.
Iām interested in seeing how theyāll monetize this, while keeping it open and community-friendly, and I say this with no snark or sarcasm at all.
Well, CM is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to Android ROMs, and ease of install, isnāt it? I was running the various versions of Slim on my old Captivate, but the first step to installing Slim was āInstall CM firstā.
Iām tempted to say yes, they are the gold standard, but at the same time I know there are some device specific custom ROMs that perform much better. They definitely have a wealth of features though. Sigh, I fail in the morning, yes, they are the gold standard. I was pretty much agreeing with you and failed to remember the definition of what a standard means IS. Good lord.
And ease-of-install wise, itās hard for me to say since Iāve been running CM for quite awhile now and I have one of their apps that checks for nightlies and downloads them for me. That said, when I first installed CM, the process was pretty much the same for every other ROM. You just pick different zip files haha.
Which is why it strikes me as significant - they have managed to establish themselves as a ROM that is open and community friendly and also efficient and effective. To convince both techies (and, with 7 million installs, Iām guessing) non-techies to install CM, Iām rather impressed.
Well, speaking as a techie who has done my fair share of custom ROM installs, I recall back when I started that they were pretty much all the same - but it seemed like at some point, a ton of roms started building upon CMās already-laid groundwork and just piggy backed on top of that. But that may be just my experience with the original Galaxy S.
Iāve been running stock JB 4.1.2 on my S3 for a while, but Iām thinking of giving CM (or one of the other ROMs) a shot. My big reason for sticking with stock on the S3 is that I really struggled with GPS issues on the Captivate with custom ROMs, but hopefully that wonāt be as big of an issue with the new(er) phone.
Thatās a good point (and something I was unaware of, thanks!), which makes me wonder if other ROMs piggyback off of CM, does that count as a CM install? Their userbase might be even smaller then.
I retired my Thunderbolt about a year back, my OG Transformer runs CM but boy was it hard to get the weather app working. GPS issue too.
Iām still wondering about how theyāre going to monetize it though. Their AMA doesnāt really say much.
For those interested: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1mnnc6/we_are_steve_cyanogen_kondik_and_koushik_koush/
Can someone explain how this works with carriers? Do all the carriers let you use CM? Do you need some special kind of contract? Can you get apps from the Google app store and run them just like on other android devices? I tried looking into this a while back and couldnāt really find any good answers. It seemed like it was implicitly assumed that anyone who would be interested in this already knew all of that from hanging out on forums or something.
Becoming a company in the USA brings jeopardy to the trustworthiness of security features. I hope theyāll take pains to keep everything transparent and open.
My impression is that the vocabulary, at least in part, stems from the history of some of the forums and enthusiasts in cooking ROMs for WinCE/WinMo devices(which was, not that Microsoft gave a damn, since they needed all the market share and enthusiasm they could get, copyright infringement, some of it teenage).
