Over the weekend, there was an uproar on various social networks, after some blogs reported that Cyangogen Inc, the company behind the custom Android version, CyanogenMod, had laid off 20% of its employees.
That number only amounts to 30 of 136 people. What’s worse was that some of the big name news outlets claimed that Cyanogen had shifted to apps, and that it will be abandoning ROM development. This story felt pretty far fetched, which is why we didn’t carry the news on AndroidPure.
Today, we came across an announcement from Steve Kondik, the founder of CyanogenMod, who rubbished the rumours of the popular ROM being discontinued. These were his exact words,
Contrary to popular belief, we are not “pivoting to apps” nor are we shelving CM
You can read more about it at Cyanogen Inc‘s website.
What perhaps went wrong for Cyanogen was its partnership with OEMs (OnePlus, Micromax Yu, Zuk) was not as profitable as it had hoped for. Many fans took to reddit to critizize Kirt McMaster, which we think is fair, especially after his comment about “Taking Android away from Google”.
And the fact that it was followed by Cyanogen’s partnership with Microsoft, which once gave rise to rumours that the Redmond company could acquire the ROM developers, was not a welcome news amongst its other partners.
Nevertheless, for now, it is a no brainer to tell people not to panic over losing the second best ROM ever, perhaps only next to AOSP.
