There is no doubt that many OnePlus2 owners have felt burned due to the lack of OTA updates that OnePlus has pushed out. For quite some time, OnePlus owners were told that the OnePlus 2 was going to receive an official update to Android 7.0 Nougat eventually. That sort of promise turned out not to be the case, making the last official build of OxygenOS for the device to be based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow instead. Fortunately, developers have recently released an early build of LineageOS 15 which is based on the Android 8.0 Oreo for the device.
OnePlus promised to have a better long-term software support for the OnePlus 3 as well as the OnePlus 3T devices since their software development division has been organized. So as of now, we’ll just have to wait and see if it’s really done or if it’s another broken promise in the making. However, users of these devices should take comfort in the fact that the OnePlus custom development community has always been tight, that’s why even if OnePlus failed to continue providing support, members of the XDA forums will be the ones to fill the gaps.
Right now, even though we don’t have any official builds of LineageOS 15 for any devices yet, the good thing is there are community developers that are building ROMs which are based on what is already in the gerrit for many devices.
OnePlus 2 is the latest to get the very first taste of Android 8.0 Oreo through LineageOS 15. This build is courtesy and made possible by the XDA Recognized Contributor Shreesha.Murthy and actually the entire LineageOS team. The initial release of Android Oreo in OnePlus 2 devices was made available yesterday. Since that time, it has already been updated to its revision 3. And as common for these early builds, it is to be considered as an alpha so there are some bugs you need to know of. However, despite some bugs, the upside is that lots of stuff really does work such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, hotspot, RIL, fingerprint scanner, VoLTE as well as the sensors like GPS.
Take note that even if it’s already functional, there still some things that is currently not working. And as of writing this article, it includes the camera, alert slider, offline gestures, and possibly more. These issues are still being debugged as of this time. So let’s cut them some slack for with an early build like this one, it’s next to impossible for a developer to know all the bugs that are present. And if you ever come across any bugs, make sure that you report it, including the logs so that the developers will be aware of it and will do something about it. The important thing is, OnePlus users won’t get stocked with the Android Marhsmallow forever. And that the best thing to do right now is to report bugs and wait until an official release comes.