OnePlus screwed over by Cyanogen’s new exclusivity deal in India

Poor OnePlus just can’t take a break. Just as the company’s busy taking care of its Black Friday promotion, its store opening in Beijing and its India launch with Amazon next week, a close partner decided to drop a hurtful bomb. Cyanogen Inc., the maker of OnePlus One’s Android ROM, announced that it’s now inked a deal with Micromax to exclusively support the latter’s upcoming online brand Yu in India. And by “exclusive” we do mean no love for OnePlus, who implies in its latest blog post that Cyanogen knew about its India plan all along, yet it was suddenly shunned to make way for a new partner over there. 

OnePlus has announced today that it will be advancing the development of its own tweaked build of Android Lollipop following Cyanogen’s decision to give Micromax exclusive rights to use the OS on its handsets in India. In a blog post, the company said that the first build of its new OS would be available for Indian users of One handsets to try from sometime next month. As the devices are due to arrive from December 2 though, they will actually arrive running the current Cyanogen Mod OS initially. “It is truly unfortunate that a commitment we both made to our Indian users will now not be upheld. The One will continue to be supported globally and receive frequent OTAs,” it said. “We can’t explain Cyanogen’s decision because we don’t fully understand it ourselves.” According to a spokesperson, there’s no delay to the launch in India, though. “We are still working out exact details. The launch will not be delayed. We will ship the global version of the One in India and offer further details about our own build which will be available to start trying in December.”