Microsoft set to penetrate Cyanogen, promises app-y ending
Perverse as it might seem for mighty Microsoft to be courting geek-niche Android developer Cyanogen, the inclusion of Microsoft Apps on future distributions of the Cyanogen flavour of Android is an important win for Microsoft. The deal has been a while coming. We reported in March that it was pending despite Microsoft having …
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Friday 17th April 2015 07:09 GMT Bob Vistakin
Re: History is not on their side
@AC You forgot "who raped and murdered her best friend" and "who also stole your dinner money".
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Friday 17th April 2015 08:22 GMT phuzz
Re: Wharever next?
I think that there's a subtle difference between Cyanogen OS, and Cyanogenmod. The former being an OS they try and push to OEMs and the latter being the open source version which you can install on your phone.
I'm guessing that they won't be bundling Microsoft apps with the mod version, because pretty much everyone would be pissed off, but being open source, there'd be a version available with all the MS stuff stripped out within a day or two (there's a lot of unofficial ports of cyanogenmod).
*edit: I've just had a thought; assuming that MS don't want to publish all those apps as open source code, they probably won't allow it to be included in the free cyanogenmod ROM. You already have to download the google apps separately (should you want them) for a fresh install.
As for MS contributing to the code base, well, that depends on who at MS is doing the coding, sometimes they write good code, sometimes they write clippy. You never can tell.
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Friday 17th April 2015 02:10 GMT Schultz
Beware Microsoft bearing gifts?
The gift for Cyanogen comes in the form of little green pieces of paper. The stuff you can hand to programmers and they'll convert it into useful bits and bytes (or, as it happens, into Bing services, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Microsoft Office).
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Thursday 16th April 2015 23:04 GMT silent_count
Re: As long as I can remove it,
Imagine if construction companies behaved like this.
"Here's the new house you paid for. We've stuffed every room, floor to ceiling, full of garbage. Now instead of enjoying your purchase, you get to spend your time and energy doing unpaid cleaning work."
Yet phone manufacturers, telcos, and in this case, phone OS writers seem to think what I've described is commendable business practice.
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Friday 17th April 2015 10:31 GMT druck
Re: As long as I can remove it,
silent_count wrote:
"Here's the new house you paid for. We've stuffed every room, floor to ceiling, full of garbage. Now instead of enjoying your purchase, you get to spend your time and energy doing unpaid cleaning work."
Ever taken the side off the bath in a new house? Or opened up any other voids, such as under the stairs? It will be full of garbage the builders couldn't be arsed taking to the skip, and have just boarded up.
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Friday 17th April 2015 14:19 GMT silent_count
Re: As long as I can remove it,
Aye sir. My mother-in-law is building a house at the moment and, while her builders (friends of the family) have done a meticulous job, I know what you describe does happen. However it's not like it's standard practice for builders go looking for rubbish to fill up the client's house.
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Friday 17th April 2015 06:00 GMT Dan 55
Re: As long as I can remove it,
It should be an option on first run with a tickbox defaulted to 'no'. If 'yes' is ticked then the bloat should be downloaded.
Having the bloat sitting there ready to install or pre-installed and running filling up parts of the system with God-knows what would mean their users would desert them.
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Saturday 18th April 2015 10:34 GMT P. Lee
Re: Cyanogen better be careful
>Goodwill could easily go flying out the window if they are seen to be fragmenting the platform for the sake of a hatful of money.
MS are targeting google, not android. The aim is to get a decent android distro with MS apps, because MS has little hope of growing winphone. MS' problem is that if they don't have a foot on the client base, people will will care less about having Windows Servers. If MS doesn't have proprietary protocols in use which keep people happy, they will lose the market. MS want people on Android to be able to access their existing work environment, rather than allow some android dev (google) to drive a replacement of MS in the enterprise.
MS is putting their apps on the dominant platform, which is fine. Cynaogen is probably ok in the medium term as I doubt MS will make many in-roads into mobile. If however, MS apps on android keep people on vanilla MS software and that drives winmobile sales, they're all outta luck.
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Friday 17th April 2015 00:24 GMT MrDamage
WTF?
People tend to install Cyanogen in order to remove the bloated shite that comes preinstalled on the phones from Telcos/Manufacturers. Now MS want to have their bloated shiteware preinstalled on the option that people go for to get away from this behaviour?
Is it just me, or is 2 tin scan connected by string becoming a very attractive mobile communication option?
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Friday 17th April 2015 09:47 GMT DrXym
Re: Google got themselves into this mess
Google haven't been that hostile to Cyanogenmod. They told Cyanogenmod to stop distributing their apps in the image but that's about it. So now the CM kernel is Google apps free and you have to install gapps via a bootloader after flashing a phone. Slightly inconvenient but not hugely so.
If Google really wanted to be hostile they could simply stop releasing Android source code, or dump it out as a monolithic tarball with no change history on a 6 month schedule.
Anyway CM wouldn't be the first company to take a hatful of money from Microsoft and find out that they've done a very foolish thing. In this case it's likely MS bunged them cash simply to sour relations between CM and Google and fragment the android market. Google may well retaliate in ways as such as I described and everyone will be the poorer for it. And I suspect that's Microsoft's goal all along.
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Friday 8th May 2015 13:33 GMT Anonymous South African Coward
Bloatware
Let's talk bloatware for a little while, before shunting back to topic.
I own two Samsung phones. My first is the venerable Galaxy S, which, until a month ago, ran stock Android. I decided to take the plunge into modding and plonked Cyanogenmod on it.
It ran beautifully, all the stock bloatware was gone, and battery life improved by 50%.
My second, the Galaxy 3 Mini (GT-i8200) still is running stock Android and we hateses it, we hateses it, we hateses it forever. No way of getting rid of unwanted bloat, and there is no easy way to upgrade it to the latest and newest Android... Add to that, some simple charger circuit woes, and I have decided to shaft Samsung and buy something else the next time I'm due for an upgrade. Adding to my woes is the unavailability of a Cyanogenmod ROM for this phone.... but rest assured, as soon as the ROM is available, I'm so going to root it.
So... in the end unwanted bloatware does not endear to end users, who will simply detest it as it just chomps the battery, causing the end user to charge more frequently, causing you to put a little more strain on the electrical grid...
As the one poster up above said :
"It should be an option on first run with a tickbox defaulted to 'no'. If 'yes' is ticked then the bloat should be downloaded."
Make it a default option for users, the user will decide whether bloat be installed or not, NOT the manufacturer. Power users do not need bloat. Finish en klaar.
Now, back to the topic - if Microsoft make their [-]apps[/-]bloatware available via the Play store, then we can decide yea or nay, and it will be providing more realistic statistics as to the popularity of their apps.
Not for me, I think. Thanks, but no thanks, I'll stick with OpenOffice and stuff I know. Don't need paperclip-wielding daemons to haunt my documents etc at all... The smaller (and simpler) the office app, the better. Heck, you will only need left/right/middle justify, bold, italics, underline, various fonts, font colours for a basic document as it is virtually impossible to type up a 10 (let alone a 100) page report on a cellphone before cramping of the fingers set in.
Leave the 10 (and 100 or 1000) page documents for laptops/desktops with proper word processors.