Now, Blu joins in on the Cyanogen OS party with its own CM phone (minus GApps)

OPPO, OnePlus, Yu... what's common between the three companies? Yeah, you guessed right; all of the three makers have/had offered phones powered by a CyanogenMod/Cyanogen OS variant.

What's interesting is that no Western phone maker has done so yet, despite pretty much all of them (barring Yu) targeting the Western market. This might all change very soon, for US-based Blu is all set to roll out a Cyanogen OS powered phone.

However, there's something that's going to be different this time. The company will NOT offer Google Play services (including all related Google apps) out of the box with the new smartphone... which is a part of Cyanogen Inc.'s bigger picture to make Cyanogen OS and Google's Android mutually exclusive.

First step to that will be Cyanogen's own app store. Cyanogen Inc. has been working on branding quite a bit, as you might have also noticed. As for the Cyanogen OS phone is concerned, it appears as though it'll come with Amazon equivalent of Google Play, i.e., the Amazon Appstore. Other apps the phone will include, according to Liliputing, will be Nokia Here, Opera, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.

It'll be interesting to see how the market reacts to a phone like the one you're picturing in your minds right now. OnePlus and Yu certainly priced their respective Cyanogen OS offerings very well, and I certainly expect Blu to continue with the trend... but how well they manage to do it is what remains to be seen.

[Source]