There has been a lot of news coming out Cyanogen Inc lately. The majority of it hasn’t been great news. But now we’re getting a bit of light shed on the issues, by the company. First up, the rumors of the company closing their Seattle office have been confirmed. In a blog post earlier this week, Cyanogen Inc announced that they are planning to consolidate their teams into one office in Palo Alto, California. They will be also offering their Seattle employees the option to relocate to California. In the blog post, the company notes that this change is to “improve the communication and performance of the team which will now operate under one roof.”
The bigger news, perhaps, is that Steve Kondik is leaving the company. Kondik created CyanogenMod and was a co-founder of Cyanogen Inc. Earlier this week, he published a post on Google+ about the issues going on at the company – which were mostly internal, and having to do with Kirt McMaster, the company’s CEO at one time and now Executive Chairman. Kondik, so far, hasn’t announced anything about his future, but he has been throwing around the idea of going back to CyanogenMod and possibly relaunching the ROM after doing some crowdsourcing.
Cyanogen Inc seemed to be a bit lost in the past few months, but consolidating their team into one central location should definitely help them get back on track. The company was officially announced in September of 2013, but hasn’t done a whole lot since then. Shortly after separating themselves from the open source CyanogenMod, they partnered up with OnePlus for the OnePlus One. Which was a brand new high-end smartphone, at an aggressive price point that ran Cyanogen OS on board. Although that partnership didn’t end well, and OnePlus eventually began making its own software. Cyanogen Inc began looking at emerging markets, to put their Cyanogen OS on smartphones that were “cheap” and would sell in huge batches. That hasn’t really worked out well for them either. So it’ll be interesting to see what they do moving forward. In October, they announced the Modular OS program, where OEMs could use parts of Cyanogen OS in their own version of Android. However, it doesn’t appear to have gained much traction just yet.