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Steve Kondik of Cyanogen: Marshmallow is all our features, next-gen chipsets will be awesome

By Daniel Petrov

Updated: Nov 23, 2015, 4:18 AM

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Android

Steve Kondik of Cyanogen: Marshmallow is all our features, next-gen chipsets will be awesome

Steve Kondik needs no introduction, as he is the guy behind the most famous and prolific Android modding project - Cyanogen. Starting with the first Android phone - the T-Mobile G1 - the developer took the early Google efforts, and made them better. He recently sat down for an interview, and spilled some beans on the future of Cyanogen OS, as well as Android phones as a whole.

First off, he started with the fact that Android hadn't been that free-for-all platform from the onset, at least the G1 wasn't very open and hackable. Google, however, left a pretty glaring omission in the code that allowed anything you key in to go to a root shell console, which opened the floodgates for modding and coming out with the first custom Android ROM for the device. On the next landmark Android phone - the original Motorola DROID - he found another easy exploit, basically a pasted line of code that let him root and bypass security, which even had a comment next to the code saying "bad things can happen here." And they did, much to our user's delight

Some of Google's stuff is really good. Some of it is just OK

The rest is history, and, according to Steve Kondik, Android gradually picked up and folded in many of the cool features that the Cyanogen community came up with, like swiping to dismiss notifications, do-not-disturb and so on, to the extent that now Android 6.0 Marshmallow essentially incorporates "all of our features," said the developer. "Some of Google's stuff is really good. Some of it is just OK," he continued, and there is always room for improvement.

The most interesting part of the interview are Steve's forward-looking comments, though, as in the future of the Cyanogen OS undertaking, which will apparently involve a truly flagship device as well, not only midrangers and low-end handsets. In fact, Cyanogen's founder is very pumped about the chipsets coming next year, and waiting to play around with the possibilities they often. This makes us think that the flagship Cyanogen phone that is alluded to in the interview, might very well come with Snapdragon 820. In fact, Steve Kondik mentions that he is using a Snapdragon 801-laden device, as you can still squeeze amazing performance out of it, while Snapdragon 810 has issues with thermal management, so he will apparently just wait it out, and hop on next year's flagship bandwagon.

To cap it all off, the interview ends on a highly positive note about the future crazy processing technologies, like Zeroth by Qualcomm:

"Zeroth is a cognitive processor, it basically simulates neurons. So you can build some really wild-ass stuff with it. The use cases for this kind of stuff is going to be, like, wild. We're only really scratching the surface of what's possible with these kinds of algorithms, now that there's silicon that can actually help you... Like, you're going to be able to run some of these crazy deep learning algorithms on your phone soon. That really changes the game. That disrupts the cloud."

source: AndroidCentral

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Daniel, a devoted tech writer at PhoneArena since 2010, has been engrossed in mobile technology since the Windows Mobile era. His expertise spans mobile hardware, software, and carrier networks, and he's keenly interested in the future of digital health, car connectivity, and 5G. Beyond his professional pursuits, Daniel finds balance in travel, reading, and exploring new tech innovations, while contemplating the ethical and privacy implications of our digital future.