Cyanogen raises $80 million in funding; aims at building Google-less phone

Cyanogen has announced it raised $80 million in funding from biggies like Twitter Ventures, Qualcomm, Telefónica Ventures, Rupert Murdoch and Premji Invest, among others. It now plans to use the investment to hire talent that can help further accelerate the development of its open source OS. Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster has also been quite vocal about his problem with Google. Now, in an interview with Forbes, McMaster has gone all out by saying, “We’re putting a bullet through Google’s head.” While he has been talking about a Google-less Android, it is for the first time that McMaster has disclosed some details on how he plans to do so. He has revealed that the company along with its hardware partner Blu, plans to build a smartphone running Google-less Cyanogen OS. The phone will be released later this year. The new Cyanogen phone will reportedly employ Amazon’s App store, Opera web browser, Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive for cloud storage, Nokia Here maps and Spotify for music. It is also said to feature Bing web search and Microsoft’s Cortana voice assistant. “Cyanogen hopes to create revenue-sharing deals with developers to integrate application services deep into the Cyanogen OS. Vikram Natarajan, Senior VP of Global Partnerships and Distribution at Cyanogen, says the deals will take a number of different forms, from distribution to in-app purchase agreements to customized services for specific countries,” points out Android Authority. However, Google is known to pressurize partners who create devices running forked version of Android. For instance, it made Acer scrap the launch of CloudMobile A800, a mobile device running Aliyun OS that was based on Android, but incompatible with Google services. While Google can’t really pressurize Cyanogen because both companies do not partner for any Android products, but we wonder if Android users will be willing to buy a device that is completely Google-less.