Nintendo Approached Cyanogen For Switch OS, But Was Told To "Stick It"

Huh. Bet he regrets that now.

Gee, that was smart of him.

What? Why would anyone tell Nintendo to "stick it" when asked to develop an OS for them?

"Bits of Android" like the settings menu, if I were to take an uneducated guess?

@SLIGEACH_EIRE

You send news tips to Nintendo Life every single day. I'm curious how much time you spend each day looking for Nintendo news. Care to share?

The OS is fine tbh it reminds me a lot of the PS4 one and that's no bad thing.

Is this the same type of "custom" like the stock Tegra chip? Are they blowing it out of proportion to make it seem like they did some actual work and didn't just copy paste?

As I think we all know, every "great business man" has to go bankrupt a few times before he's successful. I think this makes McMaster smart. Bigly.

I can't see how this move could have been considered wise unless Cyanogen didn't have faith in Nintendo's concept. It's easy now that the Switch is released to see where they were going.... but think about it from Cyanogen's point of view. Nintendo had just failed with the Wii U & were asking an up & coming company to tie it's fortune to what looked like another gimmick console.

Not sure that "stick it" is really the most mature wording to have used though!

Let's throw all the should've/would've's in one bag and see what we get.....Sony, EA, and now this. I'm sure I'm missing something here but in the end Nintendo is still doing ok.

The Switch is good on one count: speed.

On all other counts, Wii U wins every single time.

Good job creating a stinky OS, Nintendo!

This guy sounds like fun.

Telephony. Please. As requested about 2 years ago.

@Adharst, pure hubris probably. This sounds like it would have been around the launch Cyanogen Inc. and all the inflated expectations that come with a new company. He explicitly set his sights on wresting control of Android from Google* and probably thought that anything that didn't further that goal was beneath him.

*"We're putting a bullet through Google's head." (https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/03/23/meet-cyanogen-the-startup-that-wants-to-steal-android-from-google-2)

Cyanogen is a mess of a company. It was best for Nintendo not to get involved with it.

@BornInNorway81 You mean the Wii U, with the completed OS at the end of it's lifecycle is better than the brand new OS a couple of weeks after release & with more features promised down the line?

OMG, that's amazing!

Yeah, if you read his other tweets, it seems like he's joking, as in "I was an idiot, so I said no", not that he really told them to stick it, just that they stupidly passed on the opportunity for some reason.

@dumedum: Thanks for the clarification. From the selected quote, he seems like a pompous fool. But I can appreciate self-deprecating sarcasm. No doubt he regrets it.

McMaster is a douchebag! He also said they were going to put a bullet in Google's head. Lol where are you now Kirt? Oh and where is Cyanogen?? Looks like you were told to stick it!

I bet he feels an idiot now.

@DanteSolablood

The sarcasm screams "edgy teen".

Launch Wii U beat launch Switch on everything but speed.

Its better, at the end. Android is an open platform for hacks and exploits, something I very much doubt Nintendo wanted. Too much piracy leads to measures that screw the rest of the customers, like "always online".

let's forget that Switch seems to be a big hit. It was pretty damn fool to turn down Nintendo! Come on! It's Nintendo! Not a lot of people get the opportunity to work in Nintendo next system!

I would imagine Nintendo had to be very careful how much of Android they used as they wouldn't want it to be possible for people to take Switch games and hack them to run on any Android device. A bit like how it became possible to run N-gage games on most Nokia phones with a bit of tweaking.

I think he regrets that decision.

There isn't even account password protection on this stupid OS. Nintendo released a turd, although in this case, the turd can be polished.

@BornInNorway81 Some days I send in none. Some days maybe 3-5 newsworthy stories. Depends on the day, time, how busy I am and where I am.

Early days of Cyanogen would imply the 3DS.

And this is why it pays to be humble, that way if said person crash and burn, we wouldn't be roasting marshmallows by the fire.

Truly successful people in business do not burn bridges like that. Such a stupid remark for him to make.

"Cyanogen as a company is a mere shadow of its former self, and you have to wonder if McMaster regrets having turned down Nintendo, given how successful the Switch appears to be. Perhaps if he had agreed to working with the Japanese firm then he'd still be CEO and Cyanogen would be entering a brave new world of OS design."

Wow, Donald Trump level trash talk lol

Well I'm very happy that switch doesn't run on android. Android is a bloated mess.

@BornInNorway81 Os does not stink Been super stable to me, awesome in idle/sleep too. Game starts within seconds of pressing buttons.. good stuff

It makes sense as @damo mentioned why they would have turned this offer down - it was not an open source solution that Nintendo was looking for. Also Cyanogen was looking for billions of users as their market share instead of millions. Every company has to set a goal and determine what their limited resources are going to be used for. It doesn't always mean they will choose right. That is the risk of business. Does Nintendo put resources in flooding the market with Switch consoles or something else? It is all a calculated gamble.

@BornInNorway81
The Wii U OS might have all kinds of bells and whistles, but let's be real. Most of the features were unnecessary and a waste of space. Miiverse is unnecessary. Warawara Plaza is unnecessary. Nintendo TVii is unnecessary. Wii U chat is unnecessary. Those fancy animations and colorful menu is unnecessary. The Switch OS gets straight to the point: games. A super simple OS that's fast and responsive. Also, not to mention a much better handling of taking screenshots the Switch can but not the Wii U.

I must say I am not a fan of smartphone/tablet type OSes at all. They are all just full of so many bugs all the time, crashing apps etc. Android is definitely the worst (even Nexus). I tried a Oneplus phone for a while too, and Cyanogen is just as bad. iOS these days isn't much better either, I still have to reset my iPhone now and again and my iPhone hasn't worked properly since iOS 10. They just all suck.

I know Wii, WiiU, 3DS don't exactly have the most feature rich or prettiest OSes out there, but at least with what they're meant to do, they just work, at least for me anyway. I suspect Switch is similar too.

I guess it's the price we have to pay for feature rich OSes that are open to third party developers. Bug ridden operating systems in constant need of updating.

Best console OS ever was the GameCube. Completely closed and had an internal clock!! Never once encountered a bug and you can change the (already awesome) start up sound by using controllers in ports 2,3,4 or whatever it is. No need for an App Store as it's all physical media. What more do you need?!! 😀

Sincerely, an old school gamer stuck in the past and loving it.

They're still around? They're still relevant? Sounds like sour grapes to me if anything.. lol.. yea right.. they approached you.. and after talking to them YOU told THEM to stick it.. okay.

@BornInNorway81 Well this 35 year old author thinks your judgement might be slightly off then.

Talking about the Wii U OS at launch, it's easy for people to forget about performance issues, the hour long day one patch that bricked hundreds of systems & the promised features that were missing.... leading to official apologies from Nintendo.

Looking back at a console through Nostalgia goggles & attacking something new is pretty easy to do, hence you find lots of edgy teens doing so on the internet. All I call for is a little time for Nintendo to get everything in place so a fair comparison can be made.

@joealejos Switch OS is perfect.. it's fast, snappy, the GUI is simple yet sleek - Cyanogen would've been a ballache of a mess which would've left the console vulnerable

"Stick it you multi million dollar corporation approaching me to develop an OS for your hyped new system !"
When Nintendo shuns away EA in OS negotiations but approaches you and you shun them away, i might have some bad news for your decision making skills...

Sounds about right coming from a guy who seems about as arrogant as you can get. "I told them to stick it." Keeping it real dude lol.

Hey Kirt, how'd things work out with that bullet you planned to put in Google's head? Yeah. Look out for ricochets, loser.

No sympathy for this guy. Arrogant beyond words. Glad he stopped Nintendo from making the mistake of getting involved with him.

Hmm depends what you call "Android" if its the dalvik/ART virtual machine element then maybe, but that's unlikely, considering how little Switch/Nintendo OS is doing and its need to get to the "metal"

If its all the other stuff that basically just linux... so I dunno, seems a little too broad a statement to take seriously?

Nintendo have after all written their own thing for Wii, 3DS and U...

Glad he told em to stick it. I like the Switch OS. It needs some improvements and added features but I love how it runs

I guess he stuck it to himself in the end lol

@RedMageLanakyn Hey now, that Tegra X1 is totally custom...downclocked.

@BornInNorway81 guess you didn't pick up a WiiU day 1, otherwise, you'd remember the WiiU's OS took an age to reach it's preferred balance.

@Pazuzu666

I'm of course talking launch Wii U versus launch Switch.

Switch has a long way catching up to Wii U!

Ok

But why tell Nintendo to stick it?

@Tsurii Just start a video game website and post a clickbaity title and you can make $ whenever some rando says they like nintendo.

It's kinda crazy for me to hear that Nintendo wanted Android (or something based on it). I'm assuming this all happened before Nintendo were shooting down the rumours that the Switch was running Android. I'm happy the Switch isn't using it, and I'd personally prefer it if Nintendo carried on making their own operating sytems.

In regards to this guy, I'm surprised he even said anything about it. He probably regrets not doing business with Nintendo now. His loss, I guess.

@Luna_110 windows is full of piracy but MS have locked the OS on Xbox one down.

You can build an OS on Android and still lock it down.

@BornInNorway81 lol nope

@Moon I don't think it was crazy for Nintendo to have looked at Android, companies like Nokia drove themselves into the ground sticking with older OS' like Symbian when there was something clearly superior on the market. Nintendo have made the right choice in the end... but just sticking with what you know, good or bad, can lead to disaster.

I do applaud how Nintendo has actually loosened their control on aspects of hardware and online. Nvidia & DeNa aren't names to be sniffed at.

Who the hell tells Nintendo to stick it?

@BornInNorway81 Switch OS far more stable, faster and also better organised than Wii U. But I feel both are ahead of PS4 and Xbox One is a horrible bloated mess, brought by the same company behind Windows Vista.

@RedMageLanakyn We don't know if it's a stock Tegra X1.

Just some site making an X-ray doesn't mean proof that it's a stock Tegra X1. Only NVidia can provide proof.

A SoC is just not just the physical hardware and customizations don't have to necessarily show up on an X-ray.
Also, NVidia might have done a lot of customization and optimizations inside the firmware driving the SoC.

The Switch doesn't even have account password protection.

Nor does it use a user-created, publicly visible, global identifier for players. The Nintendo Account User ID is just an optional way to log into your account settings! What a waste!

Wii U had all of these account features... at launch!

Shame the guy's kind of a jerk and didn't really have a solid business plan overall. I long for the day Android and phones in general get separated from the Google/Apple duopoly. Especially Google. It would have been great to see him succeed there.

I wonder who Nintendo got to do the OS in the end? DeNA?

@BornInNorway81 It has all those things.

Never heard of this company before this article and I will probably never hear of them again.

@BornInNorway81
It does have parental controls. You can use your phone or the Switch itself to activate it. It does have a password protection. And you can share things to social media and not to the terrible Miiverse.

What a douche, and he did OnePlus dirty as well.

@LordGeovanni I like the diss at the end of the article

@DanteSolablood I don't think Cyanogen made a smart business decision. Nintendo is a 127 year old company worth billions and has mayor succes with the Wii and DS a couple of years ago and still successful with the 3DS now. They told them to "Stick it" probably because Cyanogen could not make the OS Nintendo wanted in the time given or with the budget they had

@Jeronan I know, i was just poking fun. They could change one tiny detail under the hood and claim it "custom", much like I could OC my GPU and call it a custom OC. Just pointing out how big companies like Nvidia like throwing out those words to make it seem like they did a ton of work, when the reality is they probably flipped a few switches and slapped a done sticker on it.

@ProjectCafe See: all third party devs, WiiU life cycle.

@BornInNorway81

Maybe he's building up a resume to get into video game journalism. Possibly he's keeping counts of how many times he has submitted to NintendoLife successfully. Other than that, maybe he has nothing better to do and enjoys the attention.

I think this is greatly exaggerated. He is a boastful guy that hasn't really made much headway. Nintendo may have been asking to collaborate, but he thought the Cyanogen had nothing to gain from Nintendo. In the end I doubt Nintendo used bits of Android. More likely looked at the source and wrote an entirely new kernel optimized for the hardware. I own an Ouya and a Forge TV and the Android OS is horribly unstable and slow. The Switch is incredibly fast which suggests they modified everything.

Being able to go into System Settings without having to close the currently running game alone already makes Switch's OS leagues better than Wii U's OS (not to mention that it's near instant to get in and out of System Settings on Switch vs taking dozens of seconds to do that on Wii U).

I prefer the Switch OS as it is. The Wii U was so damn slow and bloated, everything had to load, when it first launched those load times could be upwards of a a minute.

Yes it's a bit lacking, but Switch is miles ahead of Wii U.

Am I missing the bit where he says "stick it"?

The idea of the Switch v.2 with telephony would be interesting, but it would need to run a different OS. Devs don't seem keen to develop apps for any OS other than Android and iOS, and if a "Switch Phone" were going to replace my iPhone, it would need to do a lot of productivity stuff that I just can't see Nintendo doing.

@Morph You can see his "stick it" tweet in the androidcentral.com source link.

@Damo:

Uhm, why was that biased techcrunch article cited as a source?
Not only is it wrong, it left out a few crucial things:

a) Cyanogenmod (the modding project) didn't shut down. The company named Cyanogen shut down.
The Cyanogen company and the CM project have always been separate entities. In fact, the company was founded many years after CM was already established as the #1 Android mod.
The point of the company was to establish CM as an OS that phone manufacturers could license, whereas the (modding/dev) community of CM was responsible for actually making the mods, 100% independent from that company.

b) What the techcrunch strangely fails to mentiond: The CM project didn't die, it lives on as Lineage OS. It's basically the same thing, they just renamed it to avoid any further confusion with the Cyanogen company.

c) The purpose of the CM project was never to 'kill' Google's version of Android, despite that catchy headline being used by several news outlets.
However, it is true that the CM project's goal was to deliver a better, more user-friendly version of Android. And they succeded in doing exactly that. That's why for many many years now CM is by far the most popular and well-known Android mod.
And not only that, CM actually is responsible for many improvements Google implemented into Android. For example, giving/declining specific apps access to your mic/GPS/contacts/calendar/data etc was a feature that CM introduced first. Google incorporated that idea much later in Android.

The Wii U OS isn't better. It just has more features. It was very unstable and slow, and is relatively still slow to the Switch. -Sent from my Wii U.

This is for the best, the Android OS has such weird issues with game pacing. Not even Nvidia's teams have been able to get games like Tomb Raider running on the Nvidia SHIELD TV without this problem. As much as I love Android OS, I don't want it on my game consoles.

Some would see this as a dis on Nintendo, but I see it as them doing Nintendo a huge favor.

Cut off your nose to spite your face guy. Beggars can't be choosers and Nintendo is a very lucrative company.

@BornInNorway81 yes, one being barely a few weeks out and the other 4 years plus.

@Deadstanley - I like Amiibo. I dislike hearing, for the umpteenth time, that Sligeach does not like Amiibo. It has absolutely no affect on me to see that he is credited at the end of an article. Not sure what you're getting at, but I'm just glad there are articles to read during morning coffee and lunch break, regardless of who tips NL about developing stories.

@nhSnork More likely parts of the kernel or device drivers (a kernel being the core part of an operating system which interacts directly with the hardware). The Nvidia Tegra X1 is a system-on-a-chip designed for mobile devices, such as Android devices, so there's likely some good code and libraries for dealing with that hardware within the Android community.

Thank god they didn't partner with them . And thank god Android isn't
on Switch

How unnecessarily rude!

@ProjectCafe a lot of companies, these days.

@Damo Oh, I didn't know about that (guess I never followed the company that closely ^^). That explains a lot, actually.

Seems like his attitude got him what he deserved at the time. Even if he's cool with it now and loves the device, that seems to have deservedly blown up in his face being a former CEO and all that.

Well, that was a bit dumb perhaps, but I can see why as a person whose thing is modifying code to make it more open, he might be fundamentally opposed to using his knowledge to close down code. That might feel like a betrayal of prinicple to him and anything that affects a person's sense of identity is dangerous turf. Not a bad person to ask if you want to know where the vulnerable code is, I suppose, but unlikely to ever work out.

@Tsurii

It's like when a politician says something totally racist and then immediately afterwards launches into "I have tons of black, latino, jewish, muslim friends..." A professional doesn't say something this childish to a contract offer unless they're butthurt in some way.

@BornInNorway81 I've wondered that as well. It's also always news involving either someone making some sort of unverified negative statement about Nintendo or something Nintendo supposedly did which we're apparently meant to presume makes them look bad.

But I gotta hand it to the guy, his troll game is professional-grade. Not only does he hit up every single article's comments to ruffle everyone's feathers, but he goes out of his way to send in tips for any "news" he can find that could possibly foment dissent in the comments. And considering how many tips this site gets every day, he probably has to send in dozens of tips each day just to get one of them noticed.

@gatorboi352

Those are some stupid companies.

It's frickin Nintendo for God's sake!

Wow, the guy sure is an arrogant punk lol, I bet he's kicking himself now.

From what I have seen and heard the operating system is pretty fast! And it is without Google nonsense, so that's good!

I am curious to see what those bits of Android that Nintendo used in the Switch are.

@BornInNorway81 It's even funnier that this has been out for a while before NL covered it.

@NEStalgia They use a FreeBsD called UNIX, not to be confused with LINUX.

It is a blisteringly fast OS, very clean, but it is also very easy to add many new features and improvements. Add to that, it. akes up less than 500Mb of the SWITCH's 4Gb DDR4 RAM.

I think you mean a free UNIX derivative called FreeBSD But that's cool to know, I didn't know that's what they had based it on. I'm very familiar with it, and that's a really great choice for it!

Of course, modern MacOS is also based on BSD, though Apple forked and bloated the OS many years ago and locked out half its native features

Thanks for that info!

If you LOVE bugs then install a cyanogen on your phone or tablet.. it breaks a lot of stuff.. it's HOT GARBAGE!!!!!! happy his ego is bigger than his wallet.. nintendo dodged a bullet!!

Lol seriously? Why would he turn them down in such a harsh way only to start praising them when the Switch actually does come out? Real mature, man.