Once cOnsidered the preserve Of geeks, cyanOgen is nOw available preinstalled On nOt One, but twO phOnes in india. but what makes cyanOgen sO special and shOuld yOu be cOnsidering installing it Or purchasing a phOne running it? we take a clOser lOOk at this special flavOur Of andrOid
It started out as a geek thing, really. And then it suddenly
became very popular. Before you knew it, a company named
OnePlus had launched a phone running it. And Micromax
had launched a new brand just for devices that ran it in
India. We are talking of Cyanogen, a version of Android that made
its way to Indian shores officially through the OnePlus One in
November and is now being sold on the YU series of devices, the
first of which is the Yureka.
Ask a geek and they will tell you that Cyanogen is an “open
source operating system for tablets and phones based on Android.”
But that is barely scratching the surface of what the OS is. For
many people, Cyanogen is in fact the ‘true’ open source version
of Android, more ‘open’ than the version offered even by Google
itself. And such is the faith of people in it, that the OS has more
than 12 million users registered with it officially.
C for Cyanogen…and control
The origins of Cyanogen can perhaps be traced back to 2008 when
a number of hackers came out with a method to get privileged
control – also called root access – of the first Android phone,
the HTC Dream (also referred to as the G1). In non-geek terms,
this literally allowed them to get deep into the operating system,
change it comprehensively and then run it again on the phone.
What you would have would still be Android in many regard
He was better known as Cyanogen. And his modification
of Android was called CyanogenMod. This version became so
popular that it soon attracted a community of its own. The version’s
popularity kept increasing thanks to its easily installable footprint
and the control it gave the user over the interface – something
that was becoming increasingly important as more and more
manufacturers began placing their own layers and apps on
Android (such as Samsung’s TouchWiz and HTC’s Sense), many
of which the users could not control or remove. In September
2013, Cyanogen Inc was formed to commercialise CyanogenMod.
The move did create some discord in the community, but Steve
Kondiak affirmed
0 Comments