OnePlus OxygenOS is the new custom ROM, but the winner is dubious

OnePlus, the company behind the OnePlus One flagship killer, has announced today in a blog post that they have finally decided what name they would give to their new custom ROM: OxygenOS. The motivation behind the name is that Oxygen, the element, is simple and crucial to life, and it can be molded to suit everybody’s needs. OnePlus had announced a contest for naming their new custom ROM on December 17 and has since received more than 75 thousand suggestions.

The first 10 semifinalists were announced on January 10, and OxygenOS was not among the names they had suggested. These semifinalists should be receiving a OnePlus Power Bank as their prize. The winner of the contest, whose suggestion would be picked as the official and final name of the OnePlus ROM should have been announced on January 11, according to OnePlus, but the company took its sweet time because of copyright issues and things like that. You can’t choose a name that has already been taken by another product. Consequently, the official OnePlus ROM name was announced today and the winner is forum member “midifire”.

OnePlus made it clear when they announced the contest that they were free to choose a name outside of the suggestions, if they feel like it, which is perfectly reasonable. But since they announced the forum member who had suggested the name, we suppose that the 64 GB Sandstone Black OnePlus One device should be going out to midifire soon and the user should be on its way to the OnePlus HQ. The weird thing is that users are once again saying that the company is unfair and lying. The profile of midifire has not been in use since the contest started on December 17. The user was last seen on that date and they didn’t have any notable prior activity, save for some comments which sounded more like official information from the company, rather than personal opinion.

That means that users are once again saying that OnePlus is cheating. The profile of midifire is already the home of comments saying that the profile is fake, made by OnePlus employees, but that seems a bit far-fetched since the company clearly stated that if they would choose a name on their own, not taking into account suggestions from forum members, it would be ok. So why would they create a fake profile to name as the winner? Still, it is odd that midifire didn’t leave any comments in the contest thread, even though you had to submit suggestions through a form. We are curious to see how far this issue will escalate or if OnePlus will make a statement about the mysterious winner.

Contests and mysteries aside, let’s see what the company promised about OxygenOS, the upcoming OnePlus ROM. Bradon H, forum administrator, said that we would be getting more information about how the ROM will look like and what it would be capable of on February 12. He also said that OxygenOS will be a simple, customizable, fully open OS, much like what Cyanogen wants Android to be. OnePlus says there won’t be any bloat, and from what we can deduce from that is that OxygenOS will be a near-stock ROM based on Android Lollipop. We are curious to see what the final product will look like and we’re looking forward to hearing more on February 12.