Unofficial AOSP ROM Available

One of the coolest things about OnePlus is that the company embraced the indie Android fork CyanogenMod in its release of the OnePlus One. Now, thanks to an unofficial AOSP (Android Open Source Project) ROM based on the CyanogenMod kernel, OnePlus One owners can get Android 6.0 Marshmallow, or Android M, ahead of the official OTA firmware rollout.

The news comes via Ubergizmo, which found members posting a link to the Android 6.0 Marshmallow ROM at the official OnePlus forum. The custom Android M ROM is based on the CyanogenMod 12.1 kernel, which means that not only is it an unofficial copy of Google's Android 6.0 Marshmallow -- it's an unofficial copy of CyanogenMod.

The custom, unofficial Android M firmware is called the "AOSParadox Project 1.0 ROM" and of course you'll have to be familiar with flashing ROMs with TWRP Recovery or CWM on your rooted and bootloader-unlocked OnePlus One to even think about installing it. If the previous sentence was all Greek to you, you're probably better off waiting for an official OTA rollout from OnePlus.

For those intrepid enough to go off-road and off-off-road with this OnePlus One unofficial Android M ROM, expect a few bugs that haven't been ironed out yet.

The chief complaints so far have been that NFC cannot be disabled and that the WiFi firmware sometimes causes random reboots. But reportedly, as far as unofficial Android ROMs go, the AOSParadox Project 1.0 is relatively stable.

While not a complete user interface makeover, as Android 5.0 Lollipop was, the new Android 6.0 Marshmallow promises to bring several improvements under the hood, including the power-saving idling "Doze" mode, more granular control over which specific permissions you want to allow for every app, third-party app enabled Google "Now on Tap," and a simplification of the Notifications and Priority modes, including the return of the long-lost "Silent" mode.