

ESR: The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising - srl
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4084

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AndrewDucker
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.

~~~
Daniel14
Motorola?

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AndrewDucker
I thought they had their own overlay. Have they switched to providing pure
Android?

~~~
arebop
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.

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saturdaysaint
Meanwhile, a new iPhone jailbreak was downloaded over a million times _in
three days_ \- [http://9to5mac.com/2012/01/23/a5-jailbreak-absinthe-
installe...](http://9to5mac.com/2012/01/23/a5-jailbreak-absinthe-installed-
almost-1-million-times-over-the-last-3-days/).

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.

~~~
mike-cardwell
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...

~~~
batista
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.

~~~
mike-cardwell
No, it's about as "apt" as comparing Cyanogenmod installations to Angry Bird
downloads.

~~~
batista
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.

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casca
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.

~~~
bryanlarsen
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.

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BrainInAJar
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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sylvanaar
Sensationalist article.

~~~
burgerbrain
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.

~~~
batista
Well, the article says:

"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.

