Thursday, January 1, 2015

OnePlus One owners can now flash an official alpha Android 5.0 ROM

If you’re itching to give your OnePlus One a taste of Lollipop, you can do it right this very second. You just need to be ok with using alpha software too.

OnePlus has released an alpha build of its Android 5.0 Lollipop ROM that was hinted at back in November. The build is so early that it’s actually just vanilla AOSP Lollipop, with no extras or customizations to be found. OnePlus does say that it plans to build on top of it in the future, but it promises that it’ll keep the ROM “bloat-free with stock-Android-like simplicity.”

If you’ve got a OnePlus One and want to give this ROM a go, you’ll need to have the TWRP recovery on your phone. OnePlus also notes that its ROM is better with Google Mobile Services, and so it also mentions that you should install the Google Apps package after you flash the ROM so that you’ve got access to all of Google’s goodies.

Of course, since this is an alpha build, there are a few bugs that you’re likely to encounter:

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.

As with most Android ROMs, you should probably only install this build if you already know what terms like TWRP and Google Mobile Services mean. If you do, then we’d say that getting Lollipop on your OnePlus One is a pretty nice way to start 2015.

If you flash this Lollipop ROM on your OnePlus One, be sure to tell us about it!