A few months ago, there was an uproar in the Android community, when Cyanogen announced it was partnering with Microsoft to bundle its apps into Cyanogenmod OS.
Cyanogen jumped to its own defense quickly, by assuring users that it would never pre-load the Redmond company’s apps into CM.
Well, that promise seems to have been put aside, as Cyanogen’s CEO, Kirk McMaster has revealed that his company and Microsoft are working together to integrate Cortana deeply into Android. You may raise the question, Cortana for Android is already available, at least in a beta, why bother integrating it into Cyanogen OS.
Cortana on Android is sub-par compared to what she is capable on Windows Phones. This is because Android’s restrictions do not allow Cortyana to use system related functions, and this I believe is what Cyanogen and Microsoft want to change. Potentially, the move seems to be to replace Google Now with Cortana.
McMaster is not a fan of Google apps, and for that matter neither am I. Google shouldn’t pre-load its own apps into Android devices, when they are available at the Google Play Store. It must be up to the user, who ultimately decides which app needs to be on the phone.
That being said, McMaster made ridiculously high claims that he wanted to take Android away from Google. This drew a lot of flak from users who questioned his intentions, and whether Microsoft was actually behind this. That’s an old story.
However, now McMaster even thinks that Windows Phones could be replaced by Cyanogen OS phones, and I’m not quite sure whether Microsoft is going to take all this lightly. But one thing is clear, he seems to have forgotten that Cyanogen OS is a mod,”Cyanogenmod”, and thrives on Android. It is merely a fork of Google’s operating system. Without it, or even without the Google Play Store, I doubt Cyanogen OS would even exist.
source: IB Times, via Techno Buffalo
