Installing CM, in its current state, will almost certainly violate the warranty on your phone. It might also violate the TOS you agreed to with your carrier, depending on your carrier.
CM is just a differently skinned version of Android. The same way that Samsung, HTC, and others all add their own skin to Android. It works the exact same way as every other version of Android under the hood, but it doesn’t have any of the carrier bloatware baked in, and it also has a bunch of other apps/functionality added on top that many phone carriers don’t have. Mostly power user features, but there’s a lot of neat/useful stuff in there.
But yes, you can connect to the Play store and download any app that would be supported by your phone using the stock version of the OS.
The “About” page in the CM wiki is a pretty good intro: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/About (and they also address the “is ROM the right term to use” question as well. :))
Could be that they’ll use the app to hook into the Google Services Framework and tell the device to treat the CM image as if it were an official update, to be applied by the recovery software (stock or otherwise) on the next boot.
Not being much of a mobile developer (but a developer nonetheless), I would be HIGHLY surprised if a) the Google Services Framework would allow such a thing; or b) the Play Store would allow somebody to submit an app that would do such a thing. The potential for abuse would be… mindboggling. But they do seem pretty confident that it’s coming, which means they must have found a way. Either that, or they’re just blowing smoke up investors’ asses to get more funding (also entirely possible).
I’m fine with installing Linux on my laptop and desktop (and I have). But the idea of rooting, jailbreaking, de-warrantying, and potentially bricking a $400-600 piece of hardware stops me cold. So I’ve just been staying away from smartphones entirely in a (probably vain) effort to retain a little privacy.
Give me an open source smartphone OS that’s as easy to install as Debian is on a desktop - something that works with pretty much any generic prepaid SIM - and I’m in. Add a decent FOSS repository and I’m your friend for life.
I’d be willing to look at a smartphone with a preinstalled FOSS OS, iff I could be reasonably sure that the manufacturer hadn’t packed it with spyware and other junk.
I’ve been kind of sidelong-glancing at those cheap ZTE beta-level Firefox OS phones being sold on the big auction site. But like Firefox the browser, Firefox OS seems bigger than what I really need (and I do NOT want social media integrated into a smartphone). And I just don’t know how trustworthy it is. I wonder how Cyanogenmod compares. Or are they not the same thing? I think I need a cheat sheet. Sigh.
Once you’ve taken a round of venture capital, your company, and your product, is no longer yours. Whatever your plans, whatever your hopes, whatever your dreams, they no longer matter unless you go do something new. (And your VC agreement probably prohibits that!) Your soul belongs to the venture capitalists. If you don’t dance to their tune, they will throw you out and put in an MBA. And when failure comes, they will blame you for it, and ruin your life forever with the subsequent lawsuits. (Phil got off easy. Most founders do worse.)
Take VC only when you plan to retire and no longer care what happens to the company. Make it clear that you’re giving over control and no longer want anything to do with the business; they can have it as a ‘going concern’ without you or not at all.
Can anyone tell me why the mod is named “cyanogen”? I can only associate it with the “kindly gust of cyanogen” that H.P. Lovecraft wished would asphyxiate the residents of New York’s Chinatown.
And your reference could very well be where that dev got his handle from