Yu Televentures had went all out with the launch of its flagship device, the Yu Yutopia. The company didn’t just have its founder and CEO Rahul Sharma on stage to announce the product, but also the heads of companies Yu had partnered with for the Yutopia. Among the prominent names were Sunil Lalvani of Qualcomm, Kirt McMaster of Cyanogen and Mitsuyoshi Hayakawa of Sharp.
Post the event we sat down with Cyanogen CEO and co-founder Kirt McMaster to talk about the evolution of Cyanogen and the future plans of the company. Official Cyanogen OS sporting phones have been in the Indian market since the launch of OnePlus One. With Yu Televentures having an exclusive tie up with Cyanogen, we have seen three of its four devices launch with Cyanogen OS with the Yu Yunique giving users the choice to add on Cyanogen over the default Android 5.1 OS.
More than apps
While McMaster didn’t give an exact date of the Cyanogen 13 OS launch, he said that it was currently under testing and would be released to the public soon. McMaster touched upon the prospect of going beyond mere apps. “We released the Cyanogen 12.1 OS in mid-December with new features. We are concentrating on very deeply integrated services from third parties. And what’s most exciting about that is that it is not just about the integration of these services into Cyanogen, it’s about how we create APIs and SDKs for these services and extend them to other application developers.”
He talked about Microsoft Cortana’s integration with Cyanogen OS and how it was different from Android and iOS. “On Android and iOS, Cortana is just an application. You go to the app and make a query and so on. But in Cyanogen it is integrated directly into the framework of the operating system. So that at some point you will be seeing Cortana and Cyanogen powering other services.”
So say if you are using a streaming service such as Hungama or Saavn, you can just talk to your phone. Just like Siri powers up music on your iPhone, you can do a similar thing with the Cortana integration on Cyanogen handsets. This is one of the improvements that users will be seeing in Cyanogen 13 said McMaster.
Different strategy
Yu Televentures announced the AroundYU service, which basically aggregates app data in a single window. When asked if that would conflict with what Cyanogen was planning to do around experiences, McMaster said that there would be no clashes.
“Our strategy is completely different from AroundYU. It does mostly service aggregation. We view ourselves as a machine intelligence company. So there is a platform that we are building and the APIs and SDKs that will be extensible to even AroundYU. So what we are building will make AroundYU even more powerful and intelligent. It is actually complementing what we are planning to do,” he said.
On the Bangalore R&D centre
As has been the case with a lot of Chinese handset makers and global companies, Cyanogen too sees India as a very important market. In fact, one of its research and development centres is located in Bangalore. McMaster says that the engineers working at the Bangalore office work on global projects in addition to India specific ones.
“These are systems and service developers working on evolving the services and intelligence framework, that we are building for these new kinds of services. They are are working on global projects not just India specific ones,” said McMaster.
Cyanogen has hired the former head of Qualcomm’s Android engineering team who looks after around 600 people across the globe. Similarly, the company has pulled in staff from Google, Flipkart and Amazon to work in its Bangalore team, to work on products that will be used globally.
New class of experience
Earlier in 2015, McMaster had created quite a stir when he spoke about breaking away from Google, and about Cyanogen building its own app store. But McMaster said that the company had plans beyond just making replacement apps.
“See, people like Google services. We ship with Google Mobile services and the Google Play Store and I don’t think there is any reason for us not to give people that option. Why should we replicate Google Play services and app store? That is not something we are interested in,” he said.
“We are interested in something that comes after apps. We think these things, some of which will be announced at the Mobile World Congress, will become more obvious. There is definitely something new coming beyond apps, a new class of experience, that can actually live side by side with an application. In fact it can super power apps,” he added.
McMaster said that Cyanogen was more interested in embracing and extending Android rather than going against it. He said he did not want to piss off Android users who already like Google services, but instead wanted to work on creating new kind of experiences that will not only help consumers but also give developers new choices.
“A lot of this stuff will be coming in 2016, after the Mobile World Congress,” said McMaster.
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