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While a number of Chinese smartphone makers are quite successful in their domestic market, not all of them make the cut when it comes to launching products that appeal to users globally. While the likes of Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo took their time to attain their positions as global leaders in smartphone sales, another company named OnePlus is now making waves globally merely two years after it launched its first smartphone. Uniquely, OnePlus, until recently, devoted its resources to running two different custom Android versions- HydrogenOS for phones that it sold in China and OxygenOS for the phones that it sold in the rest of the world. However, realization has finally dawned on the company that it may not be big enough to concentrate on two fronts and it has thus decided to eventually unify OxygenOS and HydrogenOS to create a new custom OS which may be named OnePlus OS.
While the unification process will take its own sweet time, it’s been suggested that there is more than just resource crunch which forced the company to make the announcement. Apparently, OnePlus was disproportionately diverting resources towards development and refinement of HydrogenOS at the cost of OxygenOS, which didn’t go down well with the latter’s development team. A large number of members of the OxygenOS team as such decided to terminate their contracts with OnePlus after the OnePlus 3 was released, with speculation present that the rest of the team could leave after helping out with the merger between the two custom ROMs. The list of people leaving the company’s fold includes Helen Li, OxygenOS’ Head of Mobile Product and also the chief designer of the ROM.
The OnePlus 3 now runs OxygenOS 3.5 which is the latest build issued by the company and while OnePlus drives the merger between the two ROMs in its labs, it may continue to update and refine the latest OS for international users to plug existing and new bugs as well as performance issues. However, it will be interesting to see if the new OnePlus OS will be ready by the time the company gears up to launch the OnePlus 4 next year and whether existing users of the OnePlus 3 will continue to receive periodic updates or if the company will ask them to adopt the new phone to receive continued technical support.