Microsoft apps, services to be integrated with Cyanogen Android OS
Microsoft and Android operating system vendor Cyanogen are partnering to integrate Microsoft apps and services with Cyanogen.
The arrangement between the two calls for Cyanogen to "integrate and distribute Microsoft's consumer apps and services" -- including productivity, messaging, utilities and cloud services -- with its Cyanogen Open OS Platform, which is due out later this year. Microsoft, for its part, will be creating "native integrations" of its apps and services for the Cyanogen OS. (In a similar vein, Microsoft also builds custom distributions of various core Microsoft apps for Amazon's Kindle Fire.)
The specific services Microsoft will make available for Cyanogen include Office, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook and Bing services, according to the Cyanogen press release about the deal (which I found via a link on The Verge).
The announcement of the Microsoft-Cyanogen deal follows by a day the launching by European antitrust officials have opened an investigation into Google's business practices involving Android.
Last month, Microsoft announced similar deals involving the bundling of a number of its services, including Office, Skype and OneDrive, on Samsung and Dell Android tablets.
Microsoft and Samsung also had forged a pact via which Samsung would bundle a number of Microsoft apps and services on its new Galaxy S6 phones. However, as Neowin.net reported earlier this week, Verizon and AT&T are removing some of those Microsoft services from the Samsung Galaxy S6 devices that they are selling at retail, while Sprint and T-Mobile are not doing so.