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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I am curious what the business model is for a company like this. Google and Microsoft use their mobile OSes to sell services while Apple and Blackberry use their mobile OSes to sell hardware. What does Cyanogen use its mobile OS to sell?

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They use their mobile OS to sell... their mobile OS. I'm sure there are a lot of OEMs that would love a cheap, precompiled Android to ship with their new devices. Less work for them, and Cyanogen gets to deal with updates and porting.

Wasn't that kind of supposed to be the point of Android though? Granted some work is involved with getting Android onto various hardware, but one of the reasons cyanogen exists is because the OEMs started going way to far with their android customization.

Most companies are terrible at putting together Android support and waste money on engineering teams that don't know what they are doing. If they could buy something that's 90% ready to rock + support contract I'd think it'd be pretty compelling.

And with open source they wouldn't be locked into a single vendor.

>a partnership deal with a hardware manufacturer, which the company plans to announce in the next week or so.

probably with deals like this or the same way firefox makes money

I hope their business model is going to be something like BYOD (bring your own device) and "pay us a few bucks a month to protect your privacy". Or, alternatively, buy your phone/OS from us, we'll support it and provide security updates for the next nn months/until the next major release or until End of Life for the device.

Default search engine? Start a competition between google, bing, ddg etc.

Cyanogen could potentially sell this to device manufacturers if they can make it truly Android-compatible (including Google Play compatibility) without requiring license fees paid to Google, and that would reduce cost per device, thus give a competitive edge on device price.

custom apps. access to beta's. with 50 mill users, just charging $1/mon for beta access alone would be plenty of revenue. Beyond that, there could be plenty of cyanogen official apps that provide valuable services that users would pay for.

the biggest challenge will be divergence from google. Presumable google apps will not longer be supported (then again, they are available on cyanogen today but you can flash that on). Question is, how many android users will move to cyanogen as opposed to finding another developer who can someone clean up and build android for devices.

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