NEW YORK: Cyanogen CEO Kirk McMaster has revealed that the company has partnered with US-based smartphone vendor Blu Products to release a Google-free Android smartphone.
According to McMaster, the smartphone will be released later this year and many of the details are yet to be worked out. However, the phone is said to be replacing the Google Play store with Amazon Appstore, Chrome with Opera, Google Maps with HERE, Google Drive with Dropbox or OneDrive, Google Search with Bing, Google Now with Cortana and so on.
“When these other apps are deeply integrated into the phone, most of the time they perform better than the Google apps,” Blu’s CEO Samuel Ohev-Zion told Forbes in an attempt to justify the attempt.
Other details of the smartphone are a mystery at this point. While Cyanogen’s plans to replace Google with Microsoft or Amazon sound decent on paper, it will be interesting to see if there are consumers, who would want a phone without Google applications.
