Cyanogen Inc. has announced a new feature for the upcoming Marshmallow version of its commercial Android skin, Cyanogen OS. The company is launching the "Mods" platform, a way to build apps "directly into the OS." The platform's biggest participant is none other than Microsoft, which has built Skype, Cortana, OneNote, and Hyperlapse apps for Cyanogen's platform.
Cyanogen and Microsoft previously announced a "Strategic Partnership," which explains the two companies' almost joint rollout of this feature. The partnership covers "Bing services, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Microsoft Office," and it seems that most of those products are represented here. Four of the six announced Mods are Microsoft products. Configure the Mod platform appropriately and it almost seems like a Microsoft version of Android with Cyanogen as the intermediary.
Cyanogen's branding of this feature is rather confusing. "Cyanogen Inc.," the company, already makes an open source Android skin called "CyanogenMod." Cyanogen then takes CyanogenMod and adds some proprietary features to make "Cyanogen OS," a commercial version of its Android skin that it tries to license to manufacturers. That was hard enough for some people to keep straight, and now this new feature is only for Cyanogen OS, and it's called "Mods." If you're keeping track, Cyanogen Inc., Cyanogen OS, CyanogenMod, and Cyanogen's Mod platform are now all separate entities.
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