OnePlus Works Out a New Variant for the Cynogen
The Chinese electronics manufacturer OnePlus was granted some time by the Delhi High Court to think of some alternative to Cyanogen embedded on its devices and the firm has made the best use of this liberty. OnePlus has announced the development of an alpha version of its non-Cyanogen ROM called ‘Android Lollipop Alpha’. It is said to be in the early stages and an official roll out is yet awaited.
The Android Lollipop Alpha is a result of the allegations put by the homegrown smartphone maker Micromax on OnePlus, which was in an exclusive agreement with Cynogen. According to the statement by Micromax, OnePlus devices cannot run on CyanogenMod as the exclusive rights to use the same are with Micromax. The flagship phone was banned by the Delhi High Court and even its promotion and import was restricted in India. Later, the court lifted the ban temporarily and granted the Shenzhen-based electronics giant a few weeks time to come up with an alternative to Cyanogen.
The company said that the new ROM has nothing extra to offer and comes with the stock features of AOSP Lollipop. It also added that users will come across a lot of bugs as the ROM is in early stages.
As per the statement on the OnePlus forum –
This is the first step in what will become our own custom ROM. It’s so early, in fact, that this build contains no extras beyond the stock features of AOSP Lollipop. It’s the base that we will continue to build upon, improve, and customize as we stabilize core functionalities on the latest firmware updates.
As we look towards the official ROM release in the near future, we will keep to our promise and deliver an experience that is customizable, yet bloat-free with stock-Android-like simplicity by default; we wouldn’t ask you to settle for anything less.
Willing users can download the new ROM here, but the company will not cover any damages caused by the Android Lollipop Alpha.
A few bugs known to be occurring in the new ROM are:
- Data roaming turns on by default
- The ROM is likely to cause bricking. It’s advisable to take the backup of your data.
- Unstable camera and video.
- Capacitive keys do not turn off when you enable software keys.
- Periodical clock crash.
- Startup time will be a bit slow on first boot.
- Unstable Wi-Fi.
- Build not eligible for OTA updates.
With the deadline on this Chinese smartphone company from the Delhi High Court, it seems that OnePlus has done all it could to work on a variant of the Cynogen. However, this new ROM seems to have a few bugs and it will be interesting to observe whether this will hinder the sales of OnePlus in India.
