CyanogenMod has come a very long way since the days of cupcake, where they were simply an aftermarket firmware and a team of talented developers giving us custom ROMs. Now, they’re still a team of very talented developers but have grown large enough that they set out to become a fully fledged business, and have since transformed into Cyanogen Inc. That business has already worked together with a couple different hardware OEM’s from China such as Oppo and OnePlus, building specific custom versions of their aftermarket Android firmware for devices from both companies. According to the team at Cyanogen Inc., who posted some minor detail about their new venture up to Google+ this morning, they’re working on “something really cool” that some of us might just want to check out.
In the post Cyanogen provides a link to anyone interested in potentially participating in whatever it is that they’re working on, and once you hit the link to fill out the form Cyanogen had requested you get a little more information that they are working on something with a company called Nextbit, and are looking for Alpha testers for this project. Nextbit is pretty quiet on what they actually do, but the company is made up of former Google, Apple, Amazon, and Dropbox executives and team members, and now they have HTC’s Scott Croyle on board as well, who was in charge of handling the design for HTC on flagship phones.
It sounds like to us the team at Nextbit and Cyanogen Inc. may be working together to bring consumers a device, although that is merely speculation. Cyanogen’s Alpha tester form asks questions like “do you have a Nexus 5?” and “do you have a Nexus 7?”, so we are immediately thinking that whatever Alpha build of software they’re going to be needing testers for they might pick from a pool of people on those devices primarily, although they do also ask what other phones you’d be interested in testing the Alpha software on, so it’s also possible that other devices will be able to participate too. Users who are interested also have to be OK with wiping their device, which is likely something you’ll need to do, and you’ll have to be OK with giving the team your address so you can receive “cool swag” as a gift from Nextbit for participating in the Alpha. So far there’s is next to nothing when it comes to concrete details as to what’s happening between Cyanogen Inc. and Nextbit, but whatever it is, our interests are definitely there. You can find the link to the form if you’re interested by hitting the source link.