ESR: The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising
esr.ibiblio.org
esr.ibiblio.org
Pure is scare-quoted because of course Motorola still had proprietary drivers and carriers who distributed Droids still added their bundled apps and disabled objectionable features such as wifi hotspot.
But really, infering the intentions of the users d/l-ing Cyanogen is ridiculous. A million downloads is exactly the tiny fraction of the population that you would expect to tinker and modify.
What do other users, who rooted their phone? I, for example, installed OpenVPN. I had to have "su" access in order to do that. But I do not plan to install CyanogenMod any time soon simply because of lack of the time.
So... 1 million of Cyanogen users is pretty significant number in fact.
OTOH, pretty much the only time Cyanogen gets replaced with stock firmware is when you're prepping a phone for resale or warranty work. Otherwise pretty much the only thing that people replace Cyanogen with are other MOD's.
What I'm saying is that 1 million number is firm -- always a consideration when targeting a market.
The other consideration is that a lot of the people jailbreaking their iPhone are doing it to pirate apps. (Although tethering is probably also popular). OTOH, many of the 1 million installing Cyanogen are tinkerers. So apps targeting those tinkerers may sell well. Targeting pirates is harder.
Are people unfamiliar with the notion of subsets?
Two sets doesn't have to contain the same type of items.
If the type of set A is a subset of the type of B, and the number of items on A is bigger, then A is bigger than B for every supertype too.
I suspect the bloatware that networks routinely install on the phones is one reason that the iphone will continue to be so successful, despite the significant cost premium. Networks have been doing this for many years and for some reason believe that it gives them a competitive advantage. Perhaps they know something we don't.
"CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has recently passed a million installs."
I don't see it going that much further, and the number (which is obviously worldwide) is almost insignificant.
Hell, there are hardcore geek-oriented programming tools / frameworks etc that have had that many downloads or even more. For example, Eclipse Europa, a single release of the Eclipse Java IDE, had announced 2.8 million downloads.
So I see it more as a curiosity for hackers and tinkerers that is near its peak, than an actual platform that is on the rise and will have any impact on the market.
Even Linux never conquered the desktops of the great masses, and Linux has had even more benefits to it, especially being totally free as in beer to use, while with CyanogenMOD you still need to pay for your contract.