Back when OnePlus was just a brand without a device to show off and sell to people, the Chinese upstart made waves for being one of the first manufacturers to offer a supported device that shipped with Cyanogen OS onboard. Of course, a lot has happened since then and we know that things between Cyanogen and OnePlus didn’t exactly end all that well, but the OnePlus devices continue to be updated by the team behind CyanogenMod. The original OnePlus One still receives official Cyanogen updates, but the latest addition to the family, that being the budget-minded OnePlus X has now been granted official nightly builds of CyanogenMod 13.0, bringing with it Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The OnePlus X, which we reviewed here, has been given the codename of Onyx, and these new nightly builds started April 23rd, with one now available for April 25th as well. As with all builds of CyanogenMod, this will void your warranty and users will need to provide and install their own Google Apps package, too. Fans of both OnePlus and CyanogenMod will be happy to see such a device finally get support for the nightly builds, and it will be nice to see a stable release of CyanogenMod 13.0 in the future. Until then though, confident users can go ahead and install the necessary recovery and most recent build of CyanogenMod 13.0 from the source link down below. For those interested in the new security updates patch, CyanogenMod 13.0 builds are shipping with the April update, which is just one of the advantages of running such a ROM.
If nothing else, installing CyanogenMod on your OnePlus X will get you the latest version of Android, something that OnePlus seems to dragging their feet with. The OnePlus 2, last year’s flagship, only just got access to some beta builds of software running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, so who knows how long OnePlus X users will have to wait for an official update from OnePlus themselves. This is a good way of bringing the OnePlus X up-to-date and should also ensure an up-to-date device for a good couple of years to come, which is a lot more than we can say for a lot of other budget devices out there.