The news of a OnePlus ROM was not new news, as it had been reported months ago that the company was working on its own version of close-to-stock android. More recently, the company announced a competition in their forum asking members to suggest a name for their ROM. Well, if you have been waiting to see what OnePlus could bring to the ROM table then it looks like the wait is over. OnePlus today have released the first version of their very own ROM. At the moment, the ROM name has still not been decided (or at least made known) and instead is simply going by ‘Android Lollipop Alpha’. As the name suggests, this ROM is based on Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and is now available to download and install. However, before you all click download, you do need to know that this is a very early build. Quite often builds are referred to as “early” or “alpha”, but this is seriously early and OnePlus has therefore released this as a ‘community preview’ version (similar to what we saw from Google with the L preview a few months ago). OnePlus make this point in their blog post stating “It’s so early, in fact, that this build contains no extras beyond the stock features of AOSP Lollipop“. So you’ve been warned. You should expect things not to work, bugs and other nasties associated with early and alpha ROM builds.
According to OnePlus, the following are known issues with this ROM so read before installing and be warned. “Data roaming is on by default. Make sure to turn if off to avoid potential charges. As always, flashing a custom ROM incurs the risk of bricking your phone. Make sure you know what you’re doing and backup everything. Camera and video may be unstable. This build supports 4k video, however quality may be low as we are still fine-tuning the camera. Capacitive keys do not turn off when you enable software keys. Clock crashes periodically.If using the new app pinning feature in L, make sure to turn on the software keys first. Otherwise, you will have to reboot your machine. On first boot, startup time will be a bit slow. Rest assured we will speed things up in the future”.
That said, it is here and if you are interested in knowing what the future holds then get ready to install the ROM. There are no OTAs and this is a sideload only version so you will need to be rooted. You will also need TWRP installed. In fact, OnePlus also notes that there is no built-in recovery for this ROM, so after wiping you may need to reinstall TWRP again. If you are going to try this ROM, make sure you do a BACKUP. This is one of those times when you really need to take the warning and should do a backup. Other than those points, the installing process is rather standard. Boot into TWRP, wipe cache, dalvik and do a full factory wipe and reset (remembering this will wipe your data). Following this, find the file that you have already downloaded and sideloaded onto your device and hit install. At this point, you should probably wipe the cache again just to get rid of any residual files from the old ROM. Finally flash Gapps and reboot. If you want further detailed instructions then click the source link below to head over to the OnePlus forum. Otherwise, follow the link for the direct download of the new OnePlus Lollipop ROM.