The rumor that has been circulating for a few days is confirmed: OnePlus is abandoning its HydrogenOS layer, the one preinstalled on mobile phones sold in China. In its place, OnePlus in China will come with ColorOS, starting with the next OnePlus 9.
Until now, the operating system of a OnePlus mobile depended on its region: in China they come with HydrogenOS, while in the rest of the world they include OxygenOS. Global OnePlus will keep OxygenOS
The OPPO cape for the Chinese OnePlus
At first, OnePlus mobiles had CyanogenMod, although this union did not last long: in 2015, OnePlus and CyanogenMod divorced and OxygenOS, the personalization layer of OnePlus, was born. Since then, OnePlus mobiles had a different layer in China and the rest of the world: HydrogenOS in China and OxygenOS in the rest.
Everything remained the same until recently, when OnePlus gave its layer a facelift that further separated it from pure Android and which came, again, twice in the form of OxygenOS 11 and HydrogenOS 11. The latter will not have traveled much more: The Chinese OnePlus 9 will launch with Color OS 11, and the update to ColorOS will be available for other existing terminals.
The company announced in its forums that its mobiles in China will pre-install a customized version of ColorOS for OnePlus mobiles, starting with the OnePlus 9, although a beta version for the OnePlus 8 is already available. However, the company specifies that will continue to support HydrogenOS on previous models.
On the other side of the Great Wall, OnePlus global mobiles will keep OxygenOS, for the moment without any change on the horizon. The launch of OnePlus 9 will therefore be the first in which mobiles will have much more differentiated layers: OxygenOS 11 overall and ColorOS 11 in China.
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