Speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference, Cyanogen’s CEO Kirt McMaster believes that by partnering with Chinese phone vendors, they will be helping these vendors build an identity for themselves outside the country which is true. For the most part, most Chinese companies are relatively unknown outside of their country or the Asian region.
When speaking about companies like OnePlus, it seems like there is no love lost between the two. According to McMaster, “Without Cyanogen, OnePlus would have sold like one device in international markets. Essentially they built their brand on the back of Cyanogen.” He later adds, “OnePlus shipped reasonable volume, but nothing compared to what some of these other partners can ship. So we are working with partners that can scale much quicker.”
Steve Kondik, the company’s CTO on the other hand was a bit more diplomatic. According to Kondik, “That’s probably the last you will see from that partnership unfortunately. Two new companies are trying to do crazy stuff, a lot of people collide.” It is unclear as to which other companies Cyanogen will be partnering with, but we’ll keep an eye out it.