I wish that more phone companies would produce plain Google phones, and not feel the need to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market by plastering their own designs over the top. Heck, I'd settle for _one_ company doing that.
They had Motoblur on some devices, and they had "pure" Android on others.
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.
I don't see why, if CyanogenMOD use is in fact rising. The rest of the title is about as sensational as the rest of the article, which is to be expected of an editorial.
"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.
It's true that a small number of people are installing the excellent CyanogenMOD (1 million out of 170 million), there are believed to be far more people who have jailbroken their iphones. Just like CyanogenMOD, this will always be a niche product for a tiny group of enthusiasts, as most people can't rely on their local friendly hacker to perform upgrades and maintain their phones.
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.
You don't need a hacker to upgrade and maintain CyanogenMOD. You might need one to install it, but once it's on there it's simple to upgrade & maintain.
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.
I've never had an iPhone, so I could be wrong here, but... Isn't an iPhone jailbreak just a hack to let you install arbitrary apps? If I'm right, than your comparison is silly. Cyanogenmod is a complete replacement operating system...
His comparison is apt. When "just a hack" has more downloads in much less time that a "complete replacement operating system", the numbers are not in your favor.
This also sounds totally apt. If just a game on one OS platform has orders of magnitudes more downloads that your OS, then your OS is nowhere near as popular as the other OS.
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.
Jailbreaking should be compared to "rooting" in android world. And only fraction of users who rooted their phone install CyanogenMod.
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.
The big difference between installing an iPhone jailbreak and CyanogenMOD is that once on Cyanogen you stay there. With a jailbroken iPhone you often have to choose whether to stay with the jailbreak or upgrade, and many choose the upgrade.
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.
Why on earth does anyone pay any attention to esr? He wrote some Perl scripts 15 years ago and a bad essay 10 years ago and now for some reason he's lauded as a champion of open source rather than the self-aggrandizing blowhard that he is
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 54.0 ms ] threadPure 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.