US-headquartered operating system Cyanogen suits up to conquer India

BENGALURU: If there can be any hope for a new mobile operating system to gain ground in India from the existing giants, Transformers-obsessed Cyanogen expects to be the one.

The US-headquartered developer of the operating system that powers the new Micromax handsets, India's fastest-selling smartphone brand, has drawn up ambitious plans to expand in the country, by helping developers make the app more native to the Cyanogen operating system.

So far, this privilege is enjoyed mostly by the apps that are made inhouse by Google and Apple that dominate the domestic market for mobile operating systems.

"We say we are open OS. Come on board," said Vikram Natarajan, senior vice president of global partnerships and distribution at Cyanogen. "If you want deep integration into the system, we give you access to it."

Cyanogen said it will shortly begin working with Indian companies, mainly those that operate in the music and payments segments, but declined to name the firms. Earlier in May, it partnered with Truecaller to integrate its caller-id app as the native phone-dial in Cyanogen-powered phones.

"We want to have at least one marquee partnership in each area," said Natarajan, speaking from a conference room named ‘Bumblebee' at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Cyanogen chief executive Kirk McMaster's cabin is called ‘Optimus Prime' – both rooms named after fictional characters in the Transformers movie series. A life-size illustration of chief technology officer Steve Kondik in a Transformers outfit adorns the office walls.

Cyanogen began life as an open source project, CyanogenMod, to tinker with Google's Android operating system in 2009 before becoming a full-fledged company in 2013. It now has 100 million people using CyanogenMod.

Technically, Cyanogen will offer additional APIs (application program interface), or software tools and protocols, to app developers, who can access the kernel and framework of an operating system much deeper than what is possible in Android or Apple's iOS. With it, app developers can add more features to improve user experience.

"There are all these business rules --that prevent Apple, Google, etc. It is not a technical issue. It's a business issue," said Natarajan. Apple and Google did not respond to email queries from ET.

"This is new and differentiating. None of the operating systems have done this up until now," said Jayanth Kolla, founder of advisory firm Convergence Catalyst. "Cyanogen has entered the mobile OS post the leadership was established. So it is imperative that they offer something truly unique."

App developers see an upside to this.

"We foresee an organic movement in our user base as the uptake for this new operating system warms up," said Kari Krishnamurthy, vice president of growth and partnerships, Asia, at Truecaller.

Manish Maheshwari, founder of txtWeb, a platform to build text-based apps, sees Cyanogen's expansion in India as a lottery for app developers as they get a new distribution channel. "Cyanogen could also end up acquiring these apps. Apple's acquisition of Siri, after it became integrated into iOS, is a classic example," he said.