OnePlus One is about to launch in India on December 2 via Amazon but it has been greeted with a bad news today. Cyanogen has announced on its blog that it has inked a deal with Micromax, in which, it will provide software Cyanogen OS to Micromax's YU brand of smartphones exclusively.
This came as a shock to OnePlus and OnePlus One users in India, as the device won't receive updates from Cyanogen anymore. Apart from the value-for-money factor, the presence of Cyanogen OS was one of the most attractive aspects about the OnePlus One. OnePlus has announced that OnePlus One will be launched in India with Cyanogen OS onboard but it will be updated to its own software with future updates from the company. OnePlus is now working on its own software for the One, which will be available in December in beta version and a final stable version will be made available by February 2015.
Carl Pei – Director, OnePlus Global, said that this won't affect OnePlus One sold in other countries or the devices that are imported to India, that is, such devices will continue to enjoy updates from Cyanogen. OnePlus also plans to conduct an AMA (Ask me anything) on popular social media site Reddit /r/Android.
From the OnePlus blogpost:
We can’t explain Cyanogen’s decision because we don’t fully understand it ourselves. But we can explain exactly how we’ll continue offering our fans in India an amazing user experience and support for this device. OnePlus was founded not even a year ago and we have grown and evolved immeasurably since then. But our priorities have never wavered: our product and our users.
Over the past year, we’ve often reflected on ways to better serve both. Those reflections led us to start developing our own Android team, as we’ve previously announced. That team was put in place originally to build the software which would power our future devices. So, though it’s not what we originally planned, we have shifted engineering efforts to the OnePlus One upon hearing this news.
According to our current estimations, we’ll be able to release our first community build to our Indian users next month and have a production-ready build in February. Our system will be based on Lollipop, and will be built to be stable, fast, and lightweight. True to our original promise of putting user experience first, it will be bloatware-free and only carry the features important to our users. We appreciate the work that Google has put into Android, and we have no plans of departing from Material Design nor adding unnecessary customizations.
Cyanogen, which was adored by Android users for providing seamless Android ROM, will surely face some negative reaction from its fans over this decision.
