A few days ago OnePlus officially announced that their flagship device, the OnePlus One would go on sale in India from December 2nd. OnePlus also announced, the One in India would be exclusively available via Amazon. This was not entirely new news, as we had suspected as much since last week when an interesting teaser ad popped up on the Indian branch of Amazon. Since then, the news broke that the One in India will not ship with CyanogenOS (as it does in other markets). This was due to a prior arranged exclusivity agreement between Cyanogen and Micromaxx which meant that other companies (including OnePlus) could not launch a device pre-installed with Cyanogen before Micromaxx did. This announcement came as a surprise to most One owners as CyanogenOS is now considered a staple of (and for some, one of the reasons to buy) the OnePlus One. This seemed to immediately raise concerns for potential One owners and especially for those based in India. In response, OnePlus did release a blog post confirming the Indian OnePlus One’s won’t ship with CyanogenOS, but instead will come loaded with a community built ROM. This again seemed to generate a large response on social media. As such OnePlus have today released an update (in the form of a Q&A post) further explaining what this fully means for Indian One owners.
Todays post explains that Cyanogen have now discontinued support (and future updates) for One owners in India. As such the ROM which will come loaded on Indian devices will be a OnePlus stock version of Android (we have known they were working on their own stock version for some time). This ROM will include features specific to OnePlus (not developed by Cyanogen). OTA updates will not be available for some time although updates will be released and can be user updated. Indian owners will still be able to install, flash any ROM they like including CyanogenMod (or CM11s aka CyanogenOS). Unlocking the device and flashing will not void the warranty, although damages to hardware will void warranty. Indian owners will be able to install CyanogenMod updates themselves. OnePlus did confirm that they will ship the Global version of the One (running 44S) but added this will depend on the “production batch”. No further clarification on this was provided and therefore, it is assumed early Indian adopters will receive the current version of Cyanogen (without OTA updates) while future adopters will receive the OnePlus stock android.
In terms of Lollipop, OnePlus said this will roll out in India sometime in December as a nightly version. A stable version will be ready to install from February 2015. HOWEVER, this will be the OnePlus stock OS version of Lollipop and not Cyanogen’s. Indian customers will receive OTA support for two years. This date begins when OnePlus rolls-out their OS and not the date of purchase. For those interested in Cyanogen’s version of Lollipop (CM12), OnePlus did state there should be no issues with downloading and installing the community version. Although, they did add this will depend on Cyanogen support and not OnePlus. So there you go. that is the latest news on the situation in India from OnePlus. You can read the full blog by clicking here. In the meantime, how do you feel about the current announcement and the news in general? Disappointed with the way things have turned out between Cyanogen and OnePlus? Interested to give the new OnePlus stock ROM a try? Whatever your thoughts let us know.