Cyanogen Hires Former Android Lawyer Frank Montes as General Counsel

Cyanogen, which aims to offer an alternative to the official version of Android, has hired former Facebook and Google lawyer Frank Montes as its general counsel.

Montes was at Coin for six months as its general counsel before joining Cyanogen earlier this month. At Google, Montes helped draft some of the original legal documents around the licensing and distribution of Android.

Cyanogen offers a custom version of the open source version of Android combined as an alternative to the official Google services-laden option.

“When I was at Google we were aware of CyanogenMod because it was doing some things that were really interesting with the Android code base,” Montes told Re/code. “When this opportunity came up, because of my background in Android and my knowledge I thought it was a really good opportunity to try to extend Android in ways that hadn’t been done before, particularly in Asia and Latin America.”

Last week, Cyanogen announced a deal with India’s Micromax, which will use Cyanogen for a new line of phones.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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