Yesterday we found out that Kirt McMaster, CEO of Cyanogen, was stepping down to become an Executive Chairman at the company. Now Cyanogen has made a formal announcement, highlighting the new Modular OS program and reorganization.

Lior Tal has been named the CEO of Cyanogen Inc., having previously worked at the company as COO since June. Before that, he was the 'Director of Growth and Partnerships' at Facebook for five years. Kirt McMaster is the new Executive Chairman. Steve Kondik, the co-founder of the company, is now the 'Chief Science Officer,' which I assume means he is in charge of reading sensor data.

But enough about the corporate reshuffling, what about Cyanogen OS? The company's primary business has been to sell the commercial version of CyanogenMod, named Cyanogen OS, to device manufacturers. Perhaps that hasn't been going as well as the company hoped, as they reportedly laid off much of the Cyanogen OS team back in July. The company announced the Cyanogen Modular OS program on their blog post today, which is a set of "dynamic modules and MODs" that manufacturers can implement into their own ROMs.

The blog post is not clear what these modules may include, although I would presume their existing C-Apps would easily make the transition. Cyanogen claims the program will offer partners access to the company's "Artificial Intelligence cloud services," which apparently monitors usage patterns throughout the OS to help user interaction.

The announcement also doesn't make clear what will happen to CyanogenMod and CyanogenOS. CM continues to be the most-used custom ROM, but remains mostly developed by the community and device maintainers. The blog post makes clear the company wants to move away from "full stack" development, that is, developing an entire OS. That has been their primary objective with Cyanogen OS, and long before that with CyanogenMod. Their commercial OS is already somewhat of a fluke, but CyanogenMod's fate could have massive repercussions for the custom ROM community.

Source: Cyanogen Blog