Cyanogen Inc. Reportedly Fires OS Development Arm, Switches To Apps (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Android Police is reporting that the Android software company Cyanogen Inc. will be laying off 20 percent of its workforce, and will transition from OS development to applications. The Android Police report says "roughly 30 out of the 136 people Cyanogen Inc. employs" are being cut, and that the layoffs "most heavily impact the open source arm" of the company. Android Police goes on to say that CyanogenMod development by Cyanogen Inc "may be eliminated entirely." Ars Technica notes the differences between each "Cyanogen" branding. Specifically, CyanogenMod is a "free, open source, OS heavily based on Android and compatible with hundreds of devices," while Cyanogen Inc. is "a for-profit company that aims to sell Cyanogen OS to OEMs." It appears that many of the core CyanogenMod developers will no longer be paid to work on CyanogenMod, though the community is still free to develop the software." Android Police details the firing process in their report: "Layoffs reportedly came after a long executive retreat for the company's leaders and were conducted with no advanced notice. Employees who were not let go were told not to show up to work today. Those who did show up were the unlucky ones: they had generic human resources meetings rather ominously added to their calendars last night. So, everyone who arrived at Cyanogen Inc. in Seattle this morning did so to lose their job (aside from those conducting the layoffs)." Early last year, Microsoft invested in a roughly $70 million round of equity financing for the then-startup Cyanogen Inc. Not too long before that, Google tried to acquire Cyanogen Inc., but the company turned down Google's offer to seek funding from investors and major tech companies at a valuation of around $1 billion. Cyanogen Inc. CEO Kirt McMaster once said the company was "attempting to take Android away from Google" and that it was "putting a bullet through Google's head."

UPDATE 7/25/16: Cyanogen CEO and cofounder Kirt McMaster took to Twitter to dispel some of the rumors, tweeting: "Cyanogen NOT pivoting to apps. We are an OS company and our mission of creating an OPEN ANDROID stands. FALSE reporting was outstanding."

Comments

Re:Applications?

[fustakrakich]

Cyanogen Inc is turning into just another Wall Street hedge fund like Uber and Pokemon, whose main business will be in the derivatives markets. "Android applications" is irrelevant to the portfolio. Lots of weird shit happening in the markets. I wonder if if all this "capitalization" is nothing a setup for a big crash (correction, amirite?) this fall. Might be a good idea to cash out by the end of August, and then pick up some good bargains in December.

Re:Cyanogen != CyanogenMod

[hawguy]

* People were fed up with carrier-crap on their phones

I'm definitely in that camp, I'm sticking with the Nexus, not only do I not have all of the carrier crap, but I also get regular OS updates - my 3 year old Nexus 7 tablet still receives near monthly updates.

* People were fed up with Google-crap on their phones

Apparently not that many, or Cyanogen would have a market for their OS. Even cyanogen provides a wiki page to tell you how to load Google Apps on your Cyanogenmod device, because "many users find them beneficial to take full advantage of the Android ecosystem."

https://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w...

Life goes on

[guacamole]

Cyanogen Inc and its CyanogenMod project is basically the RedHat and Fedora of the Android ROM world. While losing CyanogenMod, in the worst case scenario, is going to be a loss and an annoyance in the short term, other ROM projects will take their place.

Speaking of alternatives, wasn't OmniROM supposed to be an alternative to CyanogenMod? I have had a good experience with older OmniROM ROMs, but their list of supported hardware is very short. Hope it gets better with time.

Re:Not entirely true

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at Oracle, which is run by lawyers. You better believe I'll never post anything about them in any fashion other than anonymously.

Re: Wow, open source is a disaster

[deathguppie]

I think what he is talking about is how KDE has lost it's way. KDE3 had a very solid foundational philosophy based on everything is a file. That no matter what you accessed or how you accessed it or where it was in the end all you are accessing is a file. So from the user perspective you just needed a browser to access textFiles-documents-websites-media-NFS-SMB-SSH.. you name it. You could split the app into non overlapping windows ad infinitum and copy and paste from anything to anything as if there were no such things as different access or format types. That was goal. If you wanted to open that file with another tool it was right there in the left-click drop down menu or could be selected from the full list of applications available without having to search for the file from the application menu or application file browser.

KDE4 s-canned that whole schema instead creating a just-like-everyone-else file browser and web browser (pushing konqueror to the background with no more development) and focusing instead on little desktop gizmos that never really took off. And while I admit the KDE activities thing is pretty cool it doesn't make up for the fact that it takes longer for the desktop to load than it does for the rest of the OS. KDE has really just become a big just-another-desktop..