Cyanogen Inc. Laying off 20% of Its Workforce; To ‘Pivot’ to ‘Apps’

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 23 Jul 2016

Cyanogen_logo

The  transition of CyanogenMod to Cyanogen Inc. has been rocky at best. While the company made an impressive debut with the OnePlus One, the partnership soured soon after. Since then, Cyanogen Inc. has tried to come up with multiple projects and tied up with many key local OEMs in various parts of the world to limited success.

Now, Android Police reports that the company is laying off a significant amount of its workforce. Out of the total 136 people that it employs, Cyanogen Inc. is laying off around 30 of its employees — a 20% reduction to its workforce. The cut is seeing the company reduce its team size in the systems and QA teams in Palo Alto and Seattle, while its smaller offices in India and Lisbon have been totally gutted. Some community support members have also been removed apparently. The layoffs are being done in a particularly grim manner, with Steve Kondik (a.k.a Cyanogen) himself conducting the layoffs in their Seattle office.

The report from Android Police claims that Cyanogen Inc. plans to go through some major strategic shift that will see it “pivot” to “apps.” It remains unclear what this means, but it looks like the days of Cyanogen OS are numbered.

On paper, Cyanogen OS running on a handset out of the box sounded promising, but Cyanogen Inc. failed to execute the move properly. They took significantly longer in updating their devices to the latest version of Android or even roll out regular software updates for them. Plus, their fiasco with OnePlus and a loud-mouthed CEO did not help things either.

This move from Cyanogen Inc. only affects the future of its for-profit Cyanogen OS, and not CyanogenMod whose major code is contributed by community developers.

[Via AndroidPolice]