OnePlus has had a rocky history with the OnePlus One since it launched in the Spring of this year, but it seems like the long-run success of both the phone and the company are leading OnePlus to start development on the successor. With pre-orders finally having entered reality at some point yesterday there’s plenty of hope that OnePlus will finally be able to meet demand before their second phone hits the market. According to an interview with OnePlus CEO Pete Lau the company has not only met its sales goal of 500,000 units, but it’s nearly doubled that. In addition to that the company has been making a profit since September and is looking forward to development of a second OnePlus device, but it might come with a few changes.
Back in July OnePlus started development on their own in-house ROM for the OnePlus One and has offered it as an alternative to using CyanogenMod on the phone. While there haven’t been any reasons to use OnePlus ROM outside of running stock Android, it looks like that might change in the future. It’s no secret that the partnership between OnePlus and Cyanogen, Inc. has been thin along the way, and it’s looking more and more likely that Cyanogen, Inc. and OnePlus will be dropping their partnership for the upcoming OnePlus Two. OnePlus will in effect be using this custom homebrew Android ROM instead of CM with the next phone, and it raises a lot of questions in the process.
First of all are we going to see the kind of features and update treatment that users have enjoyed with CyanogenMod? While there’s no doubt OnePlus’s next phone will enjoy the thriving modding community that the original One has had we have to consider what the phone ships with and how most customers are probably going to be using the phone. This could also mean the end of ColorOS support as well if OnePlus ships the phone with its own in-house ROM, which gets rid of the current fragmentation that the OnePlus One’s marketshare has. This gives OnePlus more freedom over the vision of its phone, and hopefully ultimately means more features and updates for end users.