OnePlus to merge Hydrogen OS and Oxygen OS to provide better updates
OnePlus is one of the most controversial manufacturers to come to the market in the last 5 years. The company burst onto the scene back in 2014 with the OnePlus One, which provided an experience like no other at a price that everyone could afford. Since the initial release, the company has been releasing “flagship killers”, including the 2016 release of the OnePlus 3.
However, there’s been one glaring issue with OnePlus devices: software. Although the company has gotten closer to a stock feel without throwing an ugly UI overtop of Android, OnePlus still has loads of room to grow. For those unaware, OnePlus actually offers two different operating systems on its devices: HydrogenOS, which is included on the Chinese variant, and OxygenOS which is on all other devices and provides the best AOSP feeling.
By maintaining two different operating systems resources can be strained and instead of continuing this practice, OnePlus is reportedly readying a new build of OxygenOS which combines the two. A report from XDA Developers explains that the merger could be coming in the upcoming community build of OxygenOS 3.5.
“The main benefit of combining our team resources is to speed up software updates. We know we have some room to continue improving there, and this is an important step in the right direction.”
The community build is essentially an open beta and is a bit of deviance from what OnePlus may have become accustomed to on previous builds of OxygenOS. By combining the two software versions, the end result seems to be moving away from the stock AOSP feel, and instead focusing on combining the best of EMUI and AOSP into a new package.
Since this new community build from OnePlus is combining two different teams and two different sets of code, there are bound to be bugs. That’s why the company has released the software for users to download and test and are encouraging users to submit bug reports so that everything can get tweaked, resulting in an all new software version.
OnePlus is so committed to receiving help from the community that co-founder Carl Pei tweeted that they are looking to help custom ROM developers fix issues with the camera software. It’s been well documented that although camera performance on the stock OnePlus 3 has little issues, but there have been plenty of problems in terms of camera quality on third-party custom ROMs.
This is going to be an interesting development in the coming weeks and months, as we see the final version of an all new OxygenOS developed. Best of all, it won’t be just from the in-house developers as long as we (the community) continues to do our due diligence and provide bug reports and feature requests.