BEIJING: OnePlus has unveiled its own Lollipop-based operating system Oxygen OS for the One smartphone. It can now be grabbed from the company website and being a brand-new OS, it needs to be installed manually.
Although the company has shared detailed instructions in its official forum, the task of switching to OxygenOS is not going to be easy for the users, who have never installed a custom ROM or flased a third-party recovery. Also, the operating system doesn’t seem to be final, as the company itself has listed a number of known issues with the current version of the OxygenOS build.
According to OnePlus, Oxygen OS includes only useful enhancements over the stock Lollipop, like gesture support (like double-tap to wake, draw O to open camera, etc.) and customisation options (like opt for software Android navigation key rather than hardware, ability to add to remove toggles from quick settings panel, etc.) and has not gone with unnecessary tweaks.
“Developing OxygenOS has been an incredibly fun and challenging experience for all of us. In this environment where everyone is fighting to standout with custom ROMs, we think it’s important to go back to basics. We place things like performance and battery life over gimmicks and bloated features. We want to be careful that we aren’t adding features simply for the sake of differentiation. We’ve implemented some important features thus far, but they are subtle and meaningful. That’s our philosophy behind OxygenOS: keep it light and essential,” wrote Carl of OnePlus in a blog post.
