Cyanogen is in talks with unnamed Chinese smartphone vendors to use its Android-based operating system, revealed the company CEO Kirt McMaster at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. At the event, McMaster and Cyanogen CTO Steve Kondik also stated that their partnership with OnePlus is over and we won’t be seeing any more Cyanogen OS-powered OnePlus devices.
“That’s probably the last you will see from that partnership unfortunately,” Kondik told PC World.
The first signs of the impending demise of OnePlus and Cyanogen partnership had appeared during the Micromax-OnePlus saga late last year, when Cyanogen-entered in an exclusive partnership with Micromax for Cyanogen OS in India, even though it already had OnePlus as a partner. Resulting in a legal war between Micromax and OnePlus for the latter’s violation of exclusivity agreement between Micromax and Cyanogen. All this created a lot of confusion for the consumers and the court documents showed that not everything was hunky-dory between OnePlus and Cyanogen Inc.
OnePlus is now busying preparing its second smartphone, which will be unveiled in Q3, 2015 and will run on Oxygen OS.
McMaster didn’t state the names of the firms they are in talks with, but he did reveal how they were trying to entice the ambitious Chinese smartphone players.
“It’s a great way for them to build some identity outside of China using a brand that’s already reasonably well known,” said Kirt McMaster. He stated that it was because of Cyanogen OS that OnePlus was able to sell its One smartphone in decent numbers, otherwise they would have failed.
“Without Cyanogen, OnePlus would have sold like one device in international markets/ Essentially they built their brand on the back of Cyanogen,” said McMaster.
Cyanogen Inc will continue to support OnePlus One.
This was on the cards. However with this arrogant & unprofessional approach by Cyanogen, I doubt if they will succeed in the long term with other manufacturers too.