The OnePlus One has been through an interesting lifespan in its debut year. This is especially in terms of its operating system. When the device was first released, it came touting a version of Cyanogen, known as CM11s, which seemed to be specially designed for the OnePlus One. This CM11s quickly became developed by the Cyanogen team into the commercial variant known as Cyanogen OS 11. Following this, rumblings began to be felt that the OnePlus team were working on their own in-house OS, although no details at the time were known about this. Towards the end of the last year, the tensions between Cyanogen and OnePlus became known and it seemed the two were mutually deciding to bring their partnership to a close. In terms of the operating system for the One, Cyanogen confirmed that they would continue support.
At the same time, all the talk was surrounding the release of Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and in terms of the One, this resulted in two OSes coming to market for the device with only weeks apart. The updated Cyanogen flavored version came to the One masses as Cyanogen OS 12, while OnePlus by now had unveiled their in-house OS as OxygenOS. Both landed for the One back in April, although, since then there has not been much in the way of update news. On this point, OnePlus have sent out a blog post this morning detailing what is happening in the near(ish) future for the OnePlus One.
It had been recently reported that some One owners were still experiencing touchscreen issues and a new fix had been developed and will be rolled out to users. OnePlus today confirmed this is still the case and will arrive soon for both OxygenOS and Cyanogen OS 12 devices. In terms of the Cyanogen running devices, OnePlus have also confirmed that Android 5.1 (dubbed CM12.1) is now in developer preview mode and is awaiting Google certification and will begin to roll out to devices once approval is received. However, in terms of OxygenOS, the news is not so positive. Although OnePlus have confirmed that the One will receive the patch fix update for the touchscreen issues, the OnePlus team have also confirmed that OnePlus One owners will not receive an official OTA for OxygenOS until after the follow-up device, the OnePlus 2 has been released. OnePlus confirmed that “OxygenOS will be the official operating system” for the OnePlus 2 and do state that they will begin more routine updates following the device’s launch. However, until then, there will be no official update for OxygenOS running Ones.