Cyanogen growing - hires Qualcomm and Amazon key engineers

Cyanogen’s goal is to “put a bullet through Google’s head” and “take Android away from them”. Can they make it? It seems very unlikely at this point, but one thing is for sure – they continue to race to the top and now they have a couple key industry leaders helping them reach their goals.

The creators of the most popular Android ROM (CyanogenMod) have just hired a couple high-profile engineers from Amazon and Qualcomm. The first is former Amazon engineering leader Stephen Lawler, who will come in as Senior Vice President of Engineering. The second new Cyanogen employee would be Qualcomm’s engineering lead Karthick Iyer, who would take his rightful position at Cyanogen as the new Vice President of Global Systems.

With companies like Foxconn, Qualcomm, Twitter and many others pumping millions into Cyanogen, there is no doubt the company is on the rise. Their strategy is to continue their global expansion and platform growth, which was the main reason for hiring such talented industry personalities.

“Our focus continues to be evolving the Android platform and driving innovation in mobile computing. Signals, services and systems are at the heart of building an evolved computing platform. Both Lawler and Iyer respectively are world class leaders in these areas, each having scaled some of the most successful computing and services platforms. Lawler brings a wealth of technical leadership in mobile, mapping, location, search, and cloud services. Iyer has deep expertise in end-to-end Android development. Both understand how to optimally scale engineering organizations.” -Kirt McMaster, Co-founder and CEO of Cyanogen Inc.

The company recently lost an important partner – OnePlus. This is not the end of Cyanogen in the Asian market, though. They aim to team up with “bigger Chinese vendors”. Who will they be? We are not sure yet, but CEO Kirt McMaster touts it as a loss for OnePlus, as opposed to bad news for the ROM maker.

We are going to see much more from Cyanogen in the future, even if they may not accomplish their goal to overthrow the tyrannical Google presence and make Android a much more open ecosystem without limitations. Both new hires have extensive experience in the industry and have worked on huge projects. They are certainly that important puzzle piece in Cyanogen’s future plans.

What do you think about Cyanogen’s ambitions? Can they really take on Google?

[press]PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwired – July 08, 2015) – Cyanogen Inc., a global leader in mobile computing, today announced it has brought on Amazon engineering leader Stephen Lawler as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Qualcomm Android engineering lead Karthick Iyer as Vice President of Global Systems. Lawler will oversee worldwide engineering for the company, and Iyer will lead systems engineering.

A twenty-year industry veteran, Lawler joins Cyanogen from Amazon where he was most recently a Vice President. Before that, he spent 15 years at Microsoft in key senior roles including CTO of Bing Maps, GM of Software Development for Bing Maps, Bing Mobile, Local Search, MSN and Virtual Earth.

Iyer has held ever increasing engineering responsibilities at Qualcomm Inc. for the past 18 years. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Engineering where he led a global team that designed, developed and commercialized Android solutions at the chipset level. There, he built and led a top-notch global Android organization that successfully enabled the shipments of over 1 billion Android smartphones.

“Our focus continues to be evolving the Android platform and driving innovation in mobile computing,” said Kirt McMaster, Co-founder and CEO of Cyanogen Inc. “Signals, services and systems are at the heart of building an evolved computing platform. Both Lawler and Iyer respectively are world class leaders in these areas, each having scaled some of the most successful computing and services platforms. Lawler brings a wealth of technical leadership in mobile, mapping, location, search, and cloud services. Iyer has deep expertise in end-to-end Android development. Both understand how to optimally scale engineering organizations.”

With offices in Palo Alto, Seattle and Lisbon, the company’s expansion plans include opening offices in China, India and Europe. Through its open source CyanogenMod and commercial distribution Cyanogen OS, it has a global user footprint in 190 countries.

About Cyanogen Inc.

Cyanogen is reimagining mobile computing, giving power to the people to customize their mobile device and content experiences. The CYANOGEN operating system is built on Android and known for its revolutionary personalization features, intuitive interface, speed, improved battery life, and enhanced security. With a rapidly growing global user base and a vibrant community of developers, we’re intelligently connecting smartphone and tablet consumers to people, apps, and things they love. For more information, visit Cyanogen’s website <http://www.cyngn.com>, Google+ <https://plus.google.com/+cyngn/posts>, Twitter <