The OnePlus One won't get Cyanogenmod updates in India [updated]

Update: To clarify, the OnePlus One will reportedly ship with CM in India, it just won’t get any support in the form of continued updates. This basically means that you’ll need to flash another ROM, like the upcoming OnePlus ROM in order to get updated software.

It isn’t too often that we see OnePlus in the news for anything positive anymore, and it looks like they’re continuing the trend. In a post titled “A letter to our Indian users,” OnePlus announced their plans to ship the OnePlus One to India without Cyanogenmod.

Just this week, the company announced their plans to release the One in India. Little did they know that it would be missing one of the main reasons why people buy the One. The whole situation began when Cyanogen released the 38R OTA update back in October. This update was especially important because it added SAR values inside the Settings menu to comply with Indian regulations, making it seem likely that CM was on its way to India. And then out of the blue, Cyanogen announced it would be exclusively granting rights to use its OS in India to MicroMax.

The One will still ship in India, just not with CM. The tone of the announcement can be summed up with these words,

We can’t explain Cyanogen’s decision because we don’t fully understand it ourselves.

It’s clear that OnePlus isn’t at fault here, but are these two companies really that disconnected that they could be so blindsided like this? It’s odd that CM surprised everyone with something as heavy as this. Looking on the bright side of things, OnePlus is trying to do something about it, though. OnePlus says they are putting together the company’s first community build of their own software, which will be available sometime next month. Final builds are expected to hit sometime around February.

The new OnePlus software will be based on Lollipop – lightweight, fast, and smooth – and they definitely don’t want to stray away too drastically from Google’s stock Lollipop build. They’re also committing to 2 years of updates to the new build, once the final version is released. To put the software on the devices, the company is planning on setting up stations where they can meet users face-to-face to help with any issues. Online tutorials will also be available.

Have some questions of your own for OnePlus? They’re hosting a Reddit AMA on December 5th to help clear the air on some of these issues. Indian readers, how are you feeling about the OnePlus One now? Are you still planning to purchase it?