Cyanogen Arrives in India…

Once cOnsidered the preserve Of geeks, cyanOgen is nOw available preinstalled On nOt One, but twO phOnes in india. but what makes cyanOgen sO special and shOuld yOu be cOnsidering installing it Or purchasing a phOne running it? we take a clOser lOOk at this special flavOur Of andrOid

It started out as a geek thing, really. And then it suddenly

became very popular. Before you knew it, a company named

OnePlus had launched a phone running it. And Micromax

had launched a new brand just for devices that ran it in

India. We are talking of Cyanogen, a version of Android that made

its way to Indian shores officially through the OnePlus One in

November and is now being sold on the YU series of devices, the

first of which is the Yureka.

Ask a geek and they will tell you that Cyanogen is an “open

source operating system for tablets and phones based on Android.”

But that is barely scratching the surface of what the OS is. For

many people, Cyanogen is in fact the ‘true’ open source version

of Android, more ‘open’ than the version offered even by Google

itself. And such is the faith of people in it, that the OS has more

than 12 million users registered with it officially.

C for Cyanogen…and control

The origins of Cyanogen can perhaps be traced back to 2008 when

a number of hackers came out with a method to get privileged

control – also called root access – of the first Android phone,

the HTC Dream (also referred to as the G1). In non-geek terms,

this literally allowed them to get deep into the operating system,

change it comprehensively and then run it again on the phone.

What you would have would still be Android in many regard 

He was better known as Cyanogen. And his modification

of Android was called CyanogenMod. This version became so

popular that it soon attracted a community of its own. The version’s

popularity kept increasing thanks to its easily installable footprint

and the control it gave the user over the interface – something

that was becoming increasingly important as more and more

manufacturers began placing their own layers and apps on

Android (such as Samsung’s TouchWiz and HTC’s Sense), many

of which the users could not control or remove. In September

2013, Cyanogen Inc was formed to commercialise CyanogenMod.

The move did create some discord in the community, but Steve

Kondiak affirmed