Cyanogen has announced a new feature for its Cyanogen OS operating system. The “Mods” platform allows developers to directly build apps into the operating system, which supposedly will promote better integration with features built into the OS. The company calls this the Post-App era, which presumably means that it wants to move away from apps and into modifications of the operating system.
It should be pointed out that Cyanogen OS is not the free open source Android fork offered by Cyanogen. That would be CyanogenMod. Instead, Cyanogen OS is a commercial version of its Android skin; which the company is trying to sell to manufacturers who want to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Android eco-system.
These mods will apparently function like apps, and it is not entirely clear how the are different. Cyanogen claims that developers will be able to use the platform API to directly build “unique experiences directly into Cyanogen OS”. From what we can tell, Cyanogen is planning to allow people to integrate their apps at the OS level.
Cyanogen’s partner, Microsoft, will be making up the bulk of the mods initially available when the platform is launched next month. From then, Cyanogen OS users will gain access to Skype, Cortana, OneNote, and Hyperlapse right out of the box. At the moment, it almost looks like Cyanogen OS will be Microsoft’s version of Android.
[Source: Cyanogen]
