OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei had informed us about OnePlus planning to release its own custom ROM alpha build before releasing their stable Android 5.0 build in February. It looks like OnePlus has decided to keep the controversies regarding Cyanogen OS behind and begin the new year by offering its users an alpha build of the Android 5.0 Lollipop based custom ROM for download.
In a post released on the OnePlus forums yesterday, it has released the alpha build which will need to be downloaded manually as the update will not be available over the air till OnePlus releases its stable build in February this year.
“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,” says the post.
OnePlus has also enlisted certain known issues that it is working on. For instance, data roaming will be on be default, camera and video may be unstable, 4K video is supported in the alpha build but quality is not up to the mark, clock crashes periodically, Wi-fi might be unstable, on first boot start time might be slow and so on.
This build is ideally being released so that OnePlus is able to identify issues cropping up via feedback from users and work on them to come up with a stable ROM.
The instructions to flash your OnePlus One and install the new ROM have been given