Cyanogen Mod Aims to Pull Android Away From Google

BARCELONA—Cyanogen made a dramatic announcement at Mobile World Congress with MOD, an integrated mobile platform that allows third-party apps to gain expanded capabilities by taking advantage of platform APIs, in partnership with Microsoft.

Essentially, what Cyanogen intends to do is create a new runtime, to allow third-party hooks to have deeper integration than typically allowed by Android.

"Thinner bezel, better biometrics, faster processors…changes never cease, yet many people are still bored with their devices. Why is this? We think people are intuitively looking for a more natural way to interact with them," Kirt McMaster, CEO and co-founder of Cyanogen explains.

McMaster believes that apps these days are too limited in what they can do. "According to some estimates, by 2020 Android's scale will be greater than Facebook and iOS combined. A single platform that touches over 4 billion people around the world, enabling them to do practically everything.

"But apps, as they exist today, can be boring and single-minded. Mods are something entirely different. We are excited to be working with many partners around the world who understand the new vision of computing that MOD enables for Android and we look forward to seeing the innovations that arise from it."

Cyanogen envisions people being able to get cross-app functionality through MOD. For example, a user could add Skype functionality to their dialer, launching directly into the app to use for VoIP or use Cortana to take voice-activated selfies. Some of these functions are already built into Google Now, but Cyanogen partnered with Microsoft, which is keen to see its services incorporated into Android.

"Our partnership with Cyanogen is part of our ambition to provide great digital experiences to customers across all of their devices, in all aspects of their lives," said Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President of Business Development at Microsoft. "MOD reinvents productivity for Android users by giving them access to the power of Microsoft's services in an engaging and modern way."

Cyanogen itself has never made a secret of its ambitions to pull Android away from Google. MOD looks like one point of ingress into the porus Android OS. There are some some other OEMs and MNOs on board, salivating at the idea of their apps being able to integrate into Android on a deeper level than Google would like. To that end, there will be mod-enabled devices and Cyanogen wants to help its MNOs and OEMs out with MOD Ready, a program for hardware partners to accelerate development of mod-enabled devices. The company will provide partners with development kits and chipset compatibility info.

"MOD is a giant leap forward in innovative and outside-the-box thinking," said John Sculley, former Apple chief and co-founder of Obi. "We are excited to work with Cyanogen to bring MOD Ready devices to our global customers, who crave a premium user experience and an ability to customize over all else."

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Cyanogen will have to strike a careful balance with the kind of services that are added. Android purists aren't the company's target, so their users may not object to the inclusion of these third-party apps and service, but there's a fine line to walk between functionality and bloat.

For the moment, the services that will be incorporated as mods are Cortana as a voice assistant, Skype for the dialer and VoIP, Hyperlapse to smooth and stabilize videos, TrueCaller for spam messages, and OneNote to take notes in the dialer, browser, email, and calender.

The MOD platform will start rolling out in March on devices with Cyanogen OS 13.0 or greater.