Cyanogen Announce a New Branding and a Partnership With Qualcomm

Cyanogen Inc the company have been in the news quite a bit lately, often not for good reasons. With all their highs and lows the company seems to keep getting stronger making new partnerships with well known companies. Today they have announced a partnership with Qualcomm to “provide support for the best features and UI enhancements of the Cyanogen Operating System on certain Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ processors.” This will be available for the upcoming release of Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD) planned for April of this year. In keeping with this announcement which could be considered them hitting the big time they have also unveiled a new sophisticated, mature branding.

Cyanogen Inc is known for a custom operating system based on AOSP with many enhancements and customisations. They began life as a commercial company when they partnered with Oppo on the Oppo N1, following that with Oppo’s younger sibling, OnePlus on the OnePlus One. In recent times they have had a controversial relationship with Micromax in India but it seems that in just over 12 months Cyanogen Inc have moved into the big time. Qualcomm is one of the leading CPU providers in the world so for Cyanogen Inmc to partner with them is a step in the right direction.

The enhancements that Cyanogen Inc bring will be available on the mid to lower end Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, the 200, 400 and the 600 series bringing the experience to a wide range of devices and users. All Cyanogen features will be available across these tiers and will hopefully help to streamline the rapid introduction of devices at lower development costs. The collaboration will be ongoing with Cyanogen adding new “features and services” (is this where they are breaking away from Google?) in future releases. Jason Bremner, SVP of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies has stated:

We chose to work with Cyanogen based on their deep Android expertise and innovative approach to enhancing smartphone software. By collaborating with Cyanogen, we are able to offer unique experiences to users of Snapdragon based devices.

In keeping with their announcement of the partnership with Qualcomm, Cyanogen Inc have also announced a more professional branding. Gone are the symbols and designs of the amateur custom ROM community and in are the more sophisticated designs. This is hopefully indicative of how they will conduct their business in the future with less public squabbling and more positive news for users.

Are you at all interested in this partnership? Do you think many manufacturers will keep these Cyanogen Inc enhancements in their ROMs? Do you think this is Cyanogen Inc turning the corner into a more credible, professional outfit?