CyanogenMOD goes legit, raises $7 million with plans to “bring the CM experience to everyone”

In a surprising move, especially since it comes just hours before the release of iOS 7, CyanogenMOD founder, Steve Kondik, has written an extensive blog post about his custom Android ROM: a simultaneous primer, history and manifesto.

Kondik incorporated the company in late 2012 and Cyanogen Inc. and took on a Series A round lead by Mitch Lasky’s Benchmark, which has a history of investing in open-source projects. The idea is to make CyanogenMOD into a business, hopefully a profitable one, by taking code from the Android Open Source Project, integrating essential security features like remote wiping, granular app permissions and more.

The team now wants to bring CyanogenMOD to more devices — there are 17 full-time employees at the company — and intends to create an Android app to make the process easier. Most install sheets for CyanogenMOD are over 20 steps, and the majority of carrier-sold Android devices have locked bootloaders that must be cracked, officially or otherwise, before rooting, installing a custom recovery, backing up the original files and, finally, overwriting system files with Cyanogen. It’s not an easy task for the average user, even if its results — a bloat-free, clean and fast build of the latest Android code — are worth the toil.

There is also talk of bringing CyanogenMOD to devices sold through official retail channels, though whether Google would give its blessing — the company needs to certify the software to allow access to the Google Play Store — remains to be seen.

[source]CyanogenMOD Blog[/source]