OnePlus seems to be having one heck of a brutal week since it announced the India launch of OnePlus One with Amazon next week. Cyanogen Inc., the maker of OnePlus One’s Android ROM, announced that it’s has agreed to an deal with Micromax to exclusively support the latter’s upcoming online brand Yu — a direct competitor of Xiaomi — in India. That means no CyanogenMod love for OnePlus, who claims that Cyanogen Inc knew about this a long time ago. If true, this is a surprisingly childish move from the infamous Android ROM maker.
As for OnePlus One’s India launch with Amazon, it will go ahead as planned on December 2nd and it’ll still carry CyanogenMod, but it won’t be updated. At this point, it’s not clear whether this only affects OnePlus devices sold through Amazon India (this would likely be done so by blocking out a set of IMEI numbers), or whether this is determined by location (which means one should be able to manually flash updates, if they are available on the internet).
Regardless, OnePlus co-founder and CEO Pete Lau already said that his company’s working on its very own Android ROM to replace Color OS — supplied by its OEM partner Oppo — for the China edition of its next flagship device. In light of this recent news, they’ve also reallocated development resources to build said ROM for OnePlus One users in India as well. The new system will be based on Android Lollipop, and the first community build will be available as soon as December, followed by a production-ready build in February.
Does this mean OnePlus and CyanogenMod will just jump ship from each other and look elsewhere for a new partner? We wouldn’t be surprised if so, and it’d be more hurt of a loss for Cyanogen than they could ever imagine.
On a side note, OnePlus has a Black Friday sale until Monday for OnePlus One 16GB + 64GB devices, with no invites required!
