Thanks to their legal issues with Cyanogen Inc., OnePlus was forced to work on its own custom ROM for the One, especially after the former announced that they won’t be providing software updates to the Indian variant of the handset.
OnePlus had already stated that they will release an early alpha build of their ROM in December for testing with a final stable release planned in Jan-Feb. of 2015. The young company has managed to stick to its words, and released the first alpha build of their ROM for the One late yesterday night.
For now, the ROM is simply being called ‘Android Lollipop’ and is based on Android 5.0.2. In its current state, the ROM is basically a stock build of AOSP Lollipop and only comes with a few customization options. However, the OnePlus team promises to add more features whilst keeping the ROM bloat free and easy to use before its final release in Q1 next year.
Since this is a custom ROM, it does not come preloaded with Google Apps. Users who will end up installing the ROM on their One will have to manually sideload the Google Apps on their device as well.
While the ROM is good enough for daily use, it does have a few issues as listed below.
Known issues
Data roaming is on by default. Make sure to turn if off to avoid potential charges.
As always, flashing a custom ROM incurs the risk of bricking your phone. Make sure you know what you’re doing and backup everything.
Camera and video may be unstable. This build supports 4k video, however quality may be low as we are still fine-tuning the camera.
Capacitive keys do not turn off when you enable software keys.
Clock crashes periodically.
If using the new app pinning feature in L, make sure to turn on the software keys first. Otherwise, you will have to reboot your machine.
On first boot, startup time will be a bit slow. Rest assured we will speed things up in the future.
Wi-Fi may be unstable.
This build is not elegible for OTA updates.
Installing the ROM requires OnePlus One owners to unlock the bootloader of their device and install a custom recovery on it, which in turn will wipe the handset clean of all their data.
The download link for the ROM and the flashing instructions can be found here.
