Cyanogen’s future is looking pretty good at the moment. It was three months ago when the company formed with $7 million in funding, but it wasn’t nearly enough for their plans. They just secured another $23 million from Andreessen Horowitz, which could help them bring CyanogenMod to TVs, wearables, and cars.
However, there is still a lot of work regarding mobile phones and tablets. Their ultimate goal is to give mainstream consumers the power and freedom to customize their device easily. This will most likely happen in late 2014 or early 2015.
“We feel that the existing devices you can currently buy aren’t really designed for the end user. They’re essentially designed as cash registers for the companies that make them,” says CTO Steve Kondik, who created CyanogenMod back in 2009. “A lot of people are starting to mistrust the software and devices that they use because of that fact. It’s an opportunity for us to make really good software.”
If you remember, Cyanogen released their installer app in the Play Store, only to remove it a couple of weeks later. Google was “uneasy” about it and politely asked them to take it down.
“Google was very civil,” notes Steve Kondik, “its concern was that we made things too easy — users could download an app, connect their device to a computer, type in a URL and boom, they had CyanogenMod.” Users could easily overwrite their data and not really understand what they were getting into. They did dabble with a method for backups, but the process would take as long as 20 minutes. They still hope to re-release the software with backup and restore methods, along with some how-to tutorials. Will Google approve it is anyone’s guess, but Cyanogen is hopeful.
With all this extra funding you can expect Cyanogen to hire some blood. Right now, they have 22 employees, but they plan to hire about 30 to 50 more.
Cyanogen definitely has what it takes to make fantastic software, but the key to a bright future will be to attract the mainstream, not the hardcore. That is going to be a tough nut to crack, and I am not sure they will be able to do it.
source: Engadget
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