YU is a very interesting company. This India-based company is actually owned by the country’s largest smartphone OEM, Micromax. YU has released a number of devices thus far, and all of them were powered by the Cyanogen OS which ran on top of Google’s Android operating system. The latest device they release, YU Yunique, doesn’t run Cyanogen OS out of the box though. Consumers who purchased Yunique can install Cyanogen OS on the device if they want through YU’s service centres. It seems like YU is stepping away from Cyanogen OS, at least for a moment. We still don’t know what exactly is going on, but the company has released three handsets running pure Android 5.0 Lollipop on them, and two of those were released earlier with Cyanogen OS 12 pre-installed, read on.
The YU Yuphoria and YU Yureka Plus were both announced earlier this year, and both of these devices have run Cyanogen OS on top of stock Android at launch. Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, both of these phones are currently available on Amazon India with stock Android pre-installed. The Yuphoria runs Android 5.0 Lollipop, and Yureka Plus Android 4.4 KitKat. The Yuphoria is actually more affordable in this form, and now costs only Rs. 6,499 ($100). So, YU basically re-released these two devices on Amazon India running stock Android instead of Cyanogen OS.
The third device we mentioned is the YU Yunique, the latest handset this company has launched. YU Yunique was announced a month ago, and interestingly enough, it runs stock Android 5.1 Lollipop. The company did mention that consumers who want Cyanogen OS, can get it through the company’s service centres. It seems like YU’s and Cyanogen’s relationship is slowly falling apart though, at least based on YU’s recent announcements. It seems rather odd that a company would re-release the same device with a different operating system on them. What’s even more weird, neither of those two devices are running Android 5.1 Lollipop on them, which suggests these two releases were rushed. This definitely reminds us of how OnePlus and Cyanogen parted ways a while back, they were not exactly on best terms. It remains to be seen what exactly is going on here, but we’ll keep you posted.