Layoffs at Cyanogen Inc, India office being ‘gutted’: Report

Cyanogen Inc, the maker of alternate Android operating system, is undergoing significant layoffs and is also considering a “pivot to apps”, reports Android Police citing sources.

It says that Cyanogen Inc is laying off around 30 of the 136 people, that accounts for 20% of its workforce and its open source arm is one of the worst impacted division.

A source told the publication that Cyanogen’s offices in India and Lisbon are being “essentially gutted” while the systems and QA teams in Palo Alto and Seattle have been heavily cut. We however noticed that Cyanogen Inc continues to have job listings for its Bangalore office.

Cyanogen Inc, which raised $80 million from a bunch of investors including Premji Invest, Twitter Ventures and Qualcomm in March last year, had opened an office in Bengaluru last year.

Cyanogen co-founder and CEO Kirt McMaster had told ET in December last year that the Bengaluru team has 11 people and was hoping to expand the team to upto 60 people by 2016-end. This team was expected to work on products and bring in local flavors to the operating system, along with doing testing and quality assurance. (Read: US-headquartered Cyanogen suits up to conquer India)

The company also had an exclusive tie-up with Micromax, that led to a court battle with its key partner OnePlus in India, which was eventually resolved by mutual consent five months later.

Cyanogen is now working on a new strategy overseen by new Chief Operating Officer Lior Tal who joined the company from Facebook last month, according to a report by Recode. McMaster declined to comment on the new strategy or the layoffs to the publication.

In February, Cyanogen had announced a new platform called ‘Mod’ that enables app developers to deeply integrate their apps directly into the commercial flavour of Cyanogen’s operating system dubbed ‘Cyanogen OS’. Some of its launch partners included Truecaller and Microsoft apps like Skype, Cortana, OneNote and Hyperlapse.