Cinder taps into some innovations in , another OS developed at Stanford, but the team is not building in backward compatibility with established platforms, Levis said. They want to avoid handing down core characteristics that aren't appropriate to mobile, and they can always write adaptation layers on top for backward compatibility, he said.

Security and power management are the main problems the team is trying to solve. In the security arena, they want to make both trusted and untrusted applications safe to use. Borrowing from HiStar, Cinder will do this by tracking how data flows through a system instead of tracking code, Levis said.