Cyanogen announced more changes in its operations, while parting company with co-founder Steve Kondik in a seemingly acrimonious split.

Lior Tal, recently installed CEO, said that the firm would “consolidate Cyanogen’s sites into a single team in Palo Alto”, offering employees in its Seattle facility the chance to relocate. But he also said that “understandably, some are unable to follow their role and relocate”.

“The purpose of the change is to improve the communication and performance of the team which will now operate under one roof. This consolidation effort will allow us to build in greater efficiencies and reduce restrictions in our product development lifecycle,” Tal said.

“The company is well funded and will continue to recruit great people to expand the core functions of our team,” he continued.

Cyanogen started out with the intention of offering a commercially-licensed Android alternative, which reduced the influence of Google through support for alternative apps and services. And it was not short of backers, with Microsoft, Foxconn and Qualcomm on board either financially or operationally.

But it failed to sign top-tier device makers as customers.

It recently refocused its efforts to offer parts of its platform as components, without the need to implement the full Cyanogen stack.

Co-founder split
In the same missive, the CEO said that “Cyanogen has separated ties with Steve Kondik, allowing him to continue to forge his path as he sees fit”.

In a CyanogenMod developer community post, Kondik said that “once we started to see success, my co-founder [Kirt McMaster] apparently became unhappy with running the business and not owning the vision”. This led to “misguided media nonsense” and “bad business deals”.

Cyanogen had a high-profile split with OnePlus, which had been an early backer of the platform, after Cyanogen inked an exclusive deal with Micromax for the Indian market.

McMaster became executive chairman of Cyanogen with the arrival of Tal.

“We essentially stopped shipping after a while because there ended up being two sides, split between the original vision and this new amorphous blob that nobody could figure out let alone build. Eventually I tried to salvage it with a pivot that would have brought us closer to something that would have worked, but the new guys had other plans,” Kondik wrote.

“With plenty of cash in the bank, the new guys tore the place down and will go and do whatever they are going to do. It’s probably for the best and I wish them luck, but what I was trying to do, is over,” he continued.