Cyanogen has been making substantial progress over the last couple of years and significantly over the last twelve months, with their operating systems venturing into new territories, devices and markets. Part of the reason for this more reason commercial success is due to the separation of what Cyanogen refer to as their ‘commercial’ and ‘community’ operating system builds. While their community build, CyanogenMod has been around for some time and developed an almost cult status, among the alternative ROM community, the commercial variant is much newer and designed to bring manufacturers an official type ROM which can be included on devices out of the box. The commercial variant, Cyanogen OS, is what you will find on devices like the OnePlus One and the much more recent Yureka by Yu.
Well, Cyanogen are present at MWC this week and have today announced another step in the Cyanogen OS drive forward by announcing a collaboration between them and processor giant, Qualcomm. The partnership will look to utilize the Qualcomm Snapdragon processors more efficiently with the Cyanogen operating system in future updates, resulting in what Cyanogen refer to as an enhanced UI and enhanced features. The collaboration is expected to be released in the next wave of the Qualcomm Reference Design program due for release in April.
It is worth noting, that this collaboration will not be for the entire Snapdragon range but will instead focus on the 200, 400 and 600 Snapdragon series of processors. As such, this will look to bring a much improved and more intuitive relationship between the processor and operating systems on certain devices. Most notably in emerging and developing markets. According to Cyanogen CEO, Kirt McMaster “We’re delighted to collaborate with Qualcomm on their QRD program,” further adding “We’re addressing the needs of device makers in developed and developing markets looking for a truly differentiated software experience that matter to consumers“. The changes involved are expected to roll-out with the latest version of Cyanogen OS which is based on Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and will see a number of enhancements in both performance and presentation to the dialer, messenger, calendar, contacts and similar apps and features.