Hacker News Reader

Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

I have read this and another post from CM team. I somehow missed what the main catalyst was for shutting down. Is there a succinct explanation? What happened?

View on HN

Not really. Here's what's publicly known:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyanogenMod#Restructure_and_ce...

Honestly it looks to me that they just ran out of runway and dissolved into an internal power struggle, then someone representing the investor side of things came in to shut it all down and recover what could be salvaged.

There was a post on Reddit from one of the former developers warning people to disable updates (not for regular CyanogenMod, but for the commercial devices) because the company was talking about pushing adware of some kind of the devices with an unannounced update.

https://github.com/lineageos and http://lineageos.org/ Only a fork!

As mentioned within a very well hidden easter egg in their press release:

"We will take pride in our Lineage as we move forward and continue to build on its legacy."

Hard to make money selling a free OS to replace an OS the customer doesn't pay for already?

Android is "free" to the consumer, but the payment is that if you want all of the Google apps (which are no longer part of the open source stuff) and the consumer uses the Google apps (likely), all of the search revenue goes to Google.

The numerous China Android based OS's, that are void of Google services, would disagree.

Excuse me, disagree how? They don't use the special google apps, and search revenue doesn't go to google. That's consistent with what I said. Sorry that it wasn't clear.

Good point, but for the record none of the Google apps were ever open source - they were part of the compatibility suite from the start.

They did start replacing a couple of the open source apps with Google versions, though (like the browser.)

I was thinking of the browser in particular -- the open source one was abandoned a while ago, and the proprietary one has google hard-wired as the only search engine.

> Android is "free" to the consumer, but the payment is that if you want all of the Google apps (which are no longer part of the open source stuff) and the consumer uses the Google apps (likely), all of the search revenue goes to Google.

The payment is your private information.

That too, although unpersonalized search ads are worth a lot more money than your private information.

They weren't targeting users, they were targeting manufacturers (pay them and they'll do the software).

It actually makes sense as a business model, but they messed up by backstabbing their first customer (after contracting with OnePlus, they signed an exclusive contract with MicroMax that no other company can sell cyanogenos in India, which, had OnePlus not made OxygenOS, would have killed them.)

It was probably the stupidest move they could have done, as no company would trust them again, and lost them all the goodwill they had.

>>It was probably the stupidest move they could have done, as no company would trust them again, and lost them all the goodwill they had.<<

There are plenty of people in the business world that screw so many people, businesses, banks and they still manage to continue doing business. I wish there was a name for it. Madoff is an example: even after people warned others about his business being a scam he still continued doing business until he collapsed on his own. Nobody brought him down, he did it to himself.

The big lie is what they teach us as young kids, that honor actually means something.

Power is might, and if you have it nothing else seems to matter, virtually always.

There are a fair amount of internet companies that started off as goodwill projects, though.

Screwing other people is possible when you are at (or near) the top of the pile. When you're at the bottom, it just gets you killed.

If you screw your 100th customer, you have 99 customers who are pretty likely to write it off. If you screw your first customer, it's a warning to others.

Crazy. Imagine if Microsoft have given a single vendor exclusive rights to sell their operating system in a major market. We wouldn't even know their name today, except as a historical curio.

In the mid 1980s, Microsoft did offer exclusive rights to someone to sell DOS in Japan. The seller did a bad job. The deal had to be unwound after 4 years.

I was unaware of that - I stand corrected :)

there's a good summary at the top of this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5kbnfg/cyanogen_in...

I, too, am kinda left wondering 'what happened?'

As far as I know, the straw that broke the camel's back was CM inc breaking a device exclusivity contract which as one can imagine hurt revenue and anger investors. That coupled with some aggressive PR in years past lead to this.

They were the darling of custom ROMs before Cyanogen Inc.

When they incorporated, a lot of people hoped it would help sponsor development (while others, suspecting what would happen, forked into OmniRom).

Unfortunately, once they incorporated, the company spokesman (McMaster) went against the whole original culture (they installed bloatware on their phones) and generally spoke without thinking (kill Google, etc.).

Now, they're seen as a weak wannabee Oracle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com