After challenging Google’s Android with Cyanogen, its co-founder takes aim at Windows for AI era

Kirt McMaster, co-founder of Cyanogen, is taking another swing at a dominant platform incumbent. His new company, Kora Systems, on Tuesday unveiled a Linux-based desktop operating system that embeds AI models and autonomous agents directly into the computing experience, letting them work across applications, access files, and carry context between tasks. The software, called Kora, is slated to launch in 2027 as a free-to-use desktop OS.

The competitive backdrop is steep. Windows held roughly 77% of the worldwide desktop OS market in October, versus nearly 10% for Apple's OS X, per StatCounter web traffic data. McMaster's counter is that Kora doesn't need Windows' whole base — he's aiming at people who lean hard on AI and will pay for access to strong models and services. "Microsoft can keep its billion users," he said, estimating that 45 million to 50 million people currently generate much of AI usage and revenue, a group he expects to top 200 million users by 2033.

McMaster framed the bet as a lesson learned the hard way at Cyanogen, where he spent over five years. Despite shipping features beyond Google's version of Android, the company stayed heavily dependent on Google Mobile Services, which limited its ability to stand up an independent ecosystem. "If you are trying to compete with an incumbent but are still reliant on them, you have no chance," he said. Kora, he added, builds on an idea he began exploring late in his Cyanogen tenure: integrating third-party services directly into the OS.

One visible piece of the product is Kora's Chord chat interface, which the company says has access to both local and frontier models. That points to an architecture where model choice is a system-level concern rather than something each app handles on its own.

The open questions are as much about the 2027 timeline as the technology. Whether an OS team of 50 can deliver a cross-platform desktop product by then, whether the AI-heavy user base McMaster sizes at 45 to 50 million will actually switch operating systems, and whether Kora can avoid the platform-dependency trap that undid Cyanogen all remain unanswered. Watch for hardware-partner commitments, developer tooling, and early benchmarks on how agents behave across real applications before the launch window.