CyanogenMod Raises $7 Million in Funding, Teams with Oppo on N1 for First Release

CyanogenMod is hands-down the most popular Android custom ROM, as some of you Android enthusiasts out there may already know. CyanogenMod delivers an experience based on stock Android. Stock Android is Android free of any custom skins laid on by manufacturers. Many take advantage of custom software because they prefer stock Android over OEM crafted skins or hate pesky carrier-installed bloatware. On top of this clean, stock Android experience, the ROM is available for the bulk of Android devices floating around. And best of all, it has a huge community for troubleshooting and discussion. Installing the custom software has become easier over the years and allows users to control the overall user experience with their device.

After years of success, CyanogenMod is becoming more than just a project and evolving into a company, dubbed CyanogenMod Inc. The new company is blasting off with $7 million dollars in funding and aims to be the third, behind Android iOS, in the highly competitive mobile OS race. All this time, money, and effort makes it possible for the core CyanogenMod team to quit their day jobs and focus one-hundred-percent on the infant company. A post on the CyanogenMod blog states, “What will change is our capabilities, our speed, and our size.” They basically want to continue to support the lively community while maintaining an open-source architecture at the same time.

The company’s main goals that it has laid out are as follows: organize, lead, and support our community, create an amazing experience centered around how YOU work, security solutions that really work, stay committed to building the features our users need, no junk, constant updates, and being available on everything and to everyone. These are some great goals and CyanogenMod Inc. is pushing these goals help improve and streamline the CyanogenMod experience.

A question many of you maybe asking is: Couldn’t a fresh software company use an OEM partner? CyanogenMod Inc. has got that covered. The name Oppo may not ring a bell to people who aren’t smartphone diehards, but they announced their high-end smartphone (or phablet, to some) for the holiday season: the Oppo N1.

The N1 features a 5.9” 1080p display, a beastly Snapdragon 600 processor clocked at 1.7 GHz paired with an Adreno 320 GPU and a healthy 2GB of RAM. Ditching the traditional smartphone set up of a front-facing and rear-facing camera, the N1 features a single 13MP camera on a swivel, so you can take some scary-high-quality selfies. All of this is powered a beefy 3,610 mAh. On the software side of things, the phone has two options: Oppo’s own Color OS or CyanogenMod. The inclusion of CyanogenMod is a first, and is a huge milestone for both Oppo and CyanogenMod.

A gadget preinstalled with CyanogenMod and the transition from project to company is very interesting and proves to be promising for CyanogenMod and Oppo. A release in regions outside of China would prove to be fruitful, and hopefully will happen in the near future.

Source: The Verge