Cyanogen 'not pivoting to apps', confirms Steve Kondik

After reports around Cyanogen  job cuts and strategic shift over the weekend, Steve Kondik has tried to clear the air via a blogpost. Kondik confirms that the company is ’not going anywhere’ and not ‘pivoting to apps’. “CyanogenMod isn’t going anywhere, nor has Cyanogen Inc. discontinued its efforts towards the goal of bringing it to a larger audience,” he wrote. “CyanogenMod is something that works. Perhaps it doesn’t need to “go big” to work. I’m still wildly inspired by the idea of a platform which forces participation. Whether it’s the choice to hack your phone to bits and figure out how to install the damn thing to begin with, learning what’s possible afterwards, or just having the confidence of being in control, it still serves an important role which hasn’t been filled outside of the custom ROM community. Cyanogen Inc (including myself) will still be sponsoring the project and will continue to have an active role in it’s development. Contrary to popular belief, we are not “pivoting to apps” nor are we shelving CM. We’ll have additional information on the Inc site soon,” he further wrote. But, the post seems to have raised more questions, instead of calming the storm. He didn’t mention Cyanogen OS in the post at all. Many have also noticed that the post is on CyanogenMod blog and not Cyanogen Inc. The ‘sponsoring’ and ‘don’t need to go big’ statements have fueled a lot of speculation too. “The odd thing about that statement is that it’s the ‘Inc.’ that seems to be failing, and Kondik didn’t quite say what ‘sponsor’ meant. Will there still be nightly builds? Are they dedicating ‘Inc.’ staff to the ‘Mod’ side of things?,” points out TheNextWeb. We recently heard about Cyanogen cutting down 20 percent of its workforce. Steve Kondik, himself was said to have conducted layoffs in Seattle. The job cuts mostly impacted people working only on the open source side. The job cuts were believed as a result of the startup working on a new strategy that is being overseen by Chief Operating Officer Lior Tal who has joined the company recently from Facebook. Several top executives are already believed to have quit. The startup had raised a lot of money in the bid to offer an alternative to Google’s version of Android, but had failed to do so.