It was just a few weeks ago that Cyanogen CEO Kirk McMaster claimed that his company wants to take Android away from Google but now he’s back to take on another major player in the smartphone industry: Samsung. According to McMaster, Samsung is going to be “slaughtered” by emerging startups that create smartphones with designs and performance equal to or greater than anything Samsung has but for a far lower price.
The mobile industry is essentially a two-horse race between Apple and Samsung. But Kirt McMaster, the CEO of Cyanogen, doesn’t think things will stay that way for much longer. There’s a big shift happening, McMaster says, and it could leave companies like Samsung “slaughtered.” Cyanogen makes a forked version of Android known as CyanogenMod. It essentially lets you add new features and themes to your Android phone without compromising performance. CyanogenMod is incredibly popular among the hacker community, and it comes preloaded on the OnePlus One, which proved to be an extremely popular phone in 2014. Cyanogen’s software is a bit niche — if you were to ask the everyday Android or iPhone user, they probably would have never heard of CyanogenMod. But the company is looking to change that soon, and in 2015 there’s a chance you’ll see CyanogenMod appear on dozens of smartphones overseas.