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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.

CMInstaller_7

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]

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