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by walrus01 3461 days ago
cyanogen (the corporation) was toast when they stabbed their first major customer, oneplus, in the back...

copy and paste follows:

tl;dr: Cyanogen terminated their contract with OnePlus all of a sudden to enter an exclusive agreement with another company in India, causing the phone to be banned in the country. This is widely seen as a dick move.

OnePlus had a worldwide (excluding mainland China) non-exclusive right to use the Cyanogen trademarks and ship the software on their device. This agreement was in place for a time period, and said that Cyanogen wouldn’t work with other OEMs to develop or integrate the system during this time in the regions covered by the agreement. Cyanogen then went and made an agreement with Micromax that was exclusive (despite OnePlus already having non-exclusive rights to these countries), and told OnePlus they were terminating their agreement in an email simply saying they were terminating. Such a contract termination is most definitely unusual, and normally is not permitted without (significant) penalties... Micromax succeeded in their injunction request against OnePlus, preventing the import and sale of OnePlus devices, on account of their exclusivity deal.

https://www.xda-developers.com/cyngn-oneplus-micromax-the-le...

1 comments

I bought a OnePlus One largely because it had Cyanogen. Despite the schism I continue to get regular OS updates, and it's still one of the things I most like about the phone (the non-slip covering on the back being another, oddly).

So I agree - Cyanogen had a competitive advantage, and could have been the Red Hat of Android. Signing any kind of exclusive deal killed any chance of that, and also alienated their open-minded community.

I don't think it's just hindsight that makes this sound really dumb, but it would be fascinating to find why they thought an exclusive deal was the way to go.

Now I need to find a LineageOS phone...

I know several people with a oneplus 3, and the oxygenOS oneplus has developed internally is extremely similar to the current version of cyanogen that's running on my oneplus one. It looks basically like stock AOSP married with cyanogen and has all of the same extra features/advanced user toggles.