OnePlus released an apology letter to their Indian fans on their blog today. OnePlus One will make its debut in India on December 2nd. It has been quite a long wait for them since the phone was released in June 2014. Amazon India will have exclusive rights for selling the smartphone. Since OnePlus One has CyanogenOS installed, the software must also have the rights to run in a specific country. Last month Cyanogen and OnePlus were making the final adjustments with fitting the SAR values inside the Indian regulation standards. It all seemed everything was going as planned. Then two days ago, on November 26th Cyanogen had granted exclusive rights of their OS to Micromax’s ‘Yu’. The deal prohibits CyanogenOS to offer any support for smartphones in India, including the OnePlus One.
OnePlus One will allegedly ship with Cyanogen installed on December 2nd but won’t receive any future OTA updates like the rest of the world. That is why the OnePlus Android team, which was developing software for future smartphones had been assigned to the OnePlus One “India project”. They will release their first community build system which will be available to Indian users next month. The production-ready built as they call it will be ready in February 2015. Their system will be based on Android Lolipop. It will have all original Lolipop features like the Material design but won’t add any unnecessary customizations or bloatware. It will be stable fast and lightweight. Support and updates will also be offered until December 2016. When the production ready built becomes available in February, they will offer online support and stations with face to face support so the user will have no problem flashing the new system.
OnePlus One took the smartphone world by a surprise in June 2014. It is an extremely powerful device at budget-friendly price. It runs Snapdragon 801 SoC which has Krait 400 quad core 2.5 GHz CPU and Adreno 330 GPU alongside 3 GB of RAM storage. Existing users also like the smooth and fast experience of CyanogenOS without any bloatware installed. This incident might be indication that OnePlus will completely dismiss CyanogenOS and will use stock Android as their main OS for this and for all the future smartphones.