Cyanogen's open-sourced take on Android, Cyanogen OS, has millions of followers and is shipping pre-installed on a handful of devices across the world. The company has had a string of announcements recently, including new branding, a partnership with Qualcomm, and a new device coming from Alcatel. Today, Cyanogen is announcing a partnership with email app Boxer to pre-load the app on the next version of Cyanogen OS. Boxer on Cyanogen will be branded as Cyanogen Email powered by Boxer and will match the overall aesthetic of the rest of the Cyanogen platform.

Cyanogen users will get the same experience as the "pro" level of Boxer available through Google Play and other app stores, with support for multiple accounts, Exchange ActiveSync, customizable alerts and gestures, and integrations with cloud storage providers such as Box, DropBox and Google Drive. Boxer supports all of the major email providers, including Gmail and Google Apps, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, and standard IMAP and POP3 accounts.

Cyanogen Email lessens the company's reliance on Google's services Cyanogen Email, which replaces the basic email app that has shipped with the platform for years, joins the company's secure messaging client, which lets users send and receive encrypted text messages. Cyanogen says that devices with Google's services will still have Gmail pre-installed on them, but it will be encouraging users to try out the new Boxer experience.

For Cyanogen, a partnership with Boxer lets it rely less on Google's own services, which have come to dominate the experience across Android. It also gives the platform a better email experience than it had previously, which lets it compete better with the versions of Android developed by Samsung, LG, HTC, and others. On the flip side, Boxer will have its app and services in front of many more potential users. (Currently, the Google Play Store listing for Boxer only shows 50,000–100,000 downloads, which isn't exactly enormous for an app that's been available for three years, but that doesn't count installs from other app stores.)

Cyanogen Email will come with Cyanogen OS 12, which is based on Android 5.0 Lollipop and will be available as an update in the next few weeks. It will also come pre-loaded on devices that ship with Cyanogen OS out of the box.