Cyanogen, a startup behind its own, alternative version of the Android operating system, now has a new CEO. In the wake of reports that the company exaggerated its success in terms of active users, layoffs, and difficulties scaling, Cyanogen’s co-founder and CEO Kirt McMaster will be transitioning into an “Executive Chairman” role, while Lior Tal, previously COO, will now assume the CEO position.

In addition, Steve Kondik, Cyanogen’s co-founder and CTO, will be taking on a new role as Chief Science Officer, the company announced. He will report Stephen Lawler, the company’s SVP of Engineering.

The startup emerged from the roots of a popular open source project, CyanogenMod, which allowed smartphone owners to install a modified version of the Android OS on their devices.

The advantage of the Cyanogen OS included a number of tweaks aimed at offering better performance, battery life, and personalization features, as well as a more extensible platform for developers. For example, the recently launched MOD Platform allowed developers to more deeply integrate their apps into the OS. Meanwhile, because Cyanogen built on top of the open version of Android, it allow for things you wouldn’t find on a typical Android phone, like adding support for Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana, for example.

But things have not been going that well for Cyanogen. According to a report from The Information in August, the company had been exaggerating its user numbers. It continues to claim there are “tens of millions” of OS users, the number didn’t accurately reflect the number of active users, the report said. According on internal data shared with The Information, the company only had two to three million weekly active users – on both CyanogenMod and its commercial counterpart, Cyanogen OS.

Cyanogen also let go 20 percent of its staff earlier this summer, and, according to the letter sent from McMaster to employees, admits that, despite shipping millions of devices with its OS, was “not scaling fast enough nor in an efficient manner.”

Today’s blog post from new CEO Tal also somewhat acknowledged the company’s struggles, and announced plans to shift in its business model with the launch of a new Cyanogen Modular OS program.

“…in recent years, Android and the mobile ecosystem changed,” wrote Tal. “Android has become extremely fragmented causing serious security vulnerabilities and few or no incentives to device manufacturers to deliver software upgrades and/or security patches,” he said. “Increased demand for lower-priced smartphones, coupled with the specifications arms race, has left manufacturers focused on scale and efficiency while compromising investment in software and services. Innovation cannot happen in a vacuum, which is what we have today,” Tal added.

The company will be moving away from its former model which involved it shipping the full-stack of the operating system, the company says. Its new program will instead allows manufacturers to introduce their own, customizable smartphones that use different parts of the Cyanogen OS via dynamic modules and MODs, while still using the ROM of their choice. That means they could still run stock Android on their devices, then pick and choose the pieces of Cyanogen’s technology they want to also add.

Getting out of the business of trying to sell its own OS is a big change for the company, and one that Cyanogen hopes will allow it to achieve scale while still achieving the vision of a “more open Android” that’s not dominated by Google. It’s unclear how successful that strategy in the long run, but it’s clear that it was time for the company to make a change.

The full Cyanogen OS is still available and being sold, but is no longer the main focus.

Below is the full email sent to employees: