The Smartphone Wars: CyanogenMOD Rising
<p>CyanogenMOD, the third-party, fully-open, bloatware-free port of Android, has <a href="http://stats.cyanogenmod.com/">recently passed a million installs</a>.    And there&#8217;s talk of creating an <a href="https://plus.google.com/103583939320326217147/posts/ViJ665K38Xa">underground Market app</a> for CyanogenMOD to distribute apps that the cell carriers and the MPAA/RIAA don&#8217;t want you to have.</p>
<p>Set this against Apple&#8217;s <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360">mind-bogglingly greedy and evil</a> new Eula for iBooks, and it couldn&#8217;t be clearer what the ultimate stakes in the smartphone wars are.</p>
<p>Even in the short term, CynogenMOD&#8217;s numbers, and the plan for the Underground Market, and the wideapread revulsion against the iBooks EULA are a big deal &#8211; they&#8217;re going to crank up the pressure on cell carriers and various other malefactors in interesting ways. But maybe the most important thing CyanogenMOD&#8217;s numbers tell us is that there is, in fact, a mass market for freedom.</p>
<p><span id="more-4084"></span> </p>
<p>Lots of people, including all the world&#8217;s Apple apologists, contend that it isn&#8217;t so.  They insist that almost everyone is actually contented and better off in walled gardens &#8211; that the only people who care about software and device freedom are a tiny fringe of grognards.  A million installs are now saying &#8220;Fuck that noise!&#8221;</p>
<p>Objectively, a million isn&#8217;t greatly different from 900K &#8211; and it&#8217;s only one percent of even the U.S. smartphone userbase.  Still, &#8220;million&#8221; is an important psychological threshold.  It&#8217;s where marketers and product planners and even politicians start to take you seriously.  And it won&#8217;t stop there; a million installs recruited without marketing and in the face of the effort required to install CM means we can expect strong endogenous growth in the future.</p>
<p>About a million people &#8211; actually, when I checked just now, it was 1,096,279 &#8211; have said &#8220;Enough!&#8221;.  They&#8217;re not even willing to tolerate even the relatively light restrictions of carrier Android, let alone Apple&#8217;s beautifully-decorated jail cells.  <em>A million people!</em></p>
<p>This renews my hope &#8211; not that I was feeling defeated before, mind you, not with Android probably reaching simple majority market share right about now.  But it&#8217;s always nice when reality confirms that the downshouters and control freaks and MAAFIAAsi and glassy-eyed evangelists for the Cult Of Steve Jobs Or Someone Like Him are <em>wrong</em>.  Hugely, desperately, finally wrong.  There really is a market for liberty out there; it&#8217;s vast and it&#8217;s growing.  This genie is <em>not</em> going to be stuffed back in the bottle.</p>
