cyanogen

Specifically here, that would mean for Microsoft to switch to Cyanogen for its devices, and ship a.

I assume what you meant to say is that CyanogenMod is entirely separate from Cyanogen Inc.'s commercial product, Cyanogen OS, which has always been true.

If you don't like that and you don't want to say 'no' when asked, use Cyanogen without Gapps.

Here's hoping that Cyan manages to pull something off with this in a future Cyanogen release.

Also large parts of Cyanogen mod only exist because of the good grace of Google.

This makes me wonder if investing in Cyanogen was a wise strategy for Microsoft?

Only downside: Cyanogen had a different ring tone as default, and later that day I was in a restaurant.

Of course it never worked once I switched to cyanogen mod and I never used it even when it did work.

Well one can void one's warranty root and install cyanogen mod...

Uh, yeah but didn't Cyanogen recently announce they're working with Microsoft?

Much of the core CyanogenMod dev team are also Cyanogen Inc.

Without any research into Cyanogen and its installation whatsoever.

A couple of the problems I've had:- When the battery drained, it refused to boot past the "cyanogen" boot screen.

Microsoft's threat has been reduced to being involved in cloning what Google did - "One software start-up, Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors, including Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft, to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android."

Get a phone that's on the compatibility list for an alternative Android distribution like Cyanogen.

You can build Android/Cyanogen or Chrome from scratch -- it easily uses dozens of cores and takes hours on a slow machine.

I think Amazon, Microsoft, Cyanogen, FireFox and others should band together to offer a 'third way' with open Android.