OnePlus One launch in doubt after Cyanogen-Micromax deal

OnePlus is supposed to launch its OnePlus One phone, a phone powered by CyanogenMod, in India on December 2. But after Cyanogen Inc announced an exclusive partnership with Micromax on Friday, there is seems to be some confusion around the launch.

Micromax and Cyanogen said that the CyanogenMod OS will be exclusively available to only Micromax phones in India.

The announcement has surprised OnePlus. Responding to a query on Twitter, the company co-founder Carl Pei said that the launch of the phone was still on schedule. "Our fans have done nothing wrong. We have done nothing wrong. India has waited long enough," he tweeted.

But it was not clear if the phone would run CyanogenMod or not. One thing is sure that even if the OnePlus One launches with CynaogenMod, it will probably not receive any CyanogenMod updates and in future will see its operating system, at least in India, getting replaced with some other software.

In a "letter" on the company website, Pei said that his firm was building new Android-based operating system for the OnePlus One.

Pei said that already a team is working on the new operating system. "(the) 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," he wrote.

"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," Pei added.