You may have caught the news that Microsoft are realigning their mobility hardware vision the other week (Did Microsoft just give up on Windows Phone?), and the word on the street is they are going to take the *slightly* messy Lumia random number convention and replace it with three phones, something budget (emerging markets/smartphone newbies), something enterprise (hello blackberry market share) and premium (for fanboys!).

That’s all fine but I’ve seen something else a bit more interesting happening over in the Android space, that no one seems to be talking about, and it’s the emergence of Microsoft’s Android Phone.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts, let’s baseline some primary components of the modern smartphone that I’m going to address here:

You have an OS, on which there is a User Interface and then some capabilities (usually delivered as apps), in this case we are focussing on the dialler (it just feels wrong to leave the phone call bit off a technical reference model for a phone), the voice assistant, productivity suite, cloud storage and messaging. Now we’ve baselined what we are looking at, here is how I see the Windows Phone version of these technologies today (Windows 8.1 today but the same for Windows 10 when that is available too).

And to its right, the existing Android stack represented as a TRM with the Google applications, which are likely the most commonly used suite on Android.

With that all baselined we can start to see how Microsoft returning to its service and software roots (after a try at the Apple hardware/software turnkey solution game). In the past three months they’ve released (albeit in beta for some services) Android versions of their software that transform the Google Android device into an Android OS running various Microsoft services.

The big thing that’s going to pull this all together for them is the launcher, Arrow is a really basic launcher at the moment but with the announcement that Cortana is being made available for Android you can be pretty sure that they will be working on a way to integrate it into Arrow, displacing Google Now and OK Google.

This coupled with the whole office suite, outlook and onedrive, all having decent Android apps starts to make the whole Microsoft suite on Android idea really stack up. I’ve blended the models from above to show where I think it might land from a services point of view.

If you then consider all the rumours earlier in the year that Microsoft were looking to fund Cyanogen (Cyanogen Wants to Take Android From Google, and Microsoft May Help), probably the biggest custom Android OS in the world, who are trying to wrangle Android off of Google it starts to make sense. Cyanogen have already agreed to install Microsoft Office apps as part of their new OS release(Cyanogen Announces Strategic Partnership with Microsoft), if Cyanogen unhook Android from Google then they could start creating a full Microsoft Android OS. Which gives Microsoft all the benefits of a platform for their services without the headache of growing a hardware business…something Satya doesn’t see as the future of the business anyway. Who knows though, looking at the state HTC are in at the moment perhaps they could jump into this partnership as a hardware provider.

TL;DR: Microsoft create apps to replace all Google Apps on Android phone and partner with Cyanogen to create Microsoft Android OS.