Earlier this year when partnership between Cyanogen and OnePlus broke due to the controversy surrounded over the launch of OnePlus One in India, a truly amazing thing happened for the OnePlus One — a new OS.

When Cyanogen made their word clear that they won’t be supporting OS updates for OnePlus One in India, OnePlus went to partner with some of the key members of Paranoid Android team and developed a new Oxygen OS for the device. Interestingly though, OnePlus also decided to build a variant of the new OS by the name Hydrogen OS particularly for the OnePlus devices sold in the company’s home market (China).

What’s really exciting about all this is that OnePlus One now had 3 official OSs and the users had the freedom to install any of these without voiding the device’ warranty, thanks to OnePlus’ bootloader unlock policy that doesn’t void warranty if you root or install custom ROM on OnePlus devices.

Now coming to OnePlus 2, of course we don’t have the Cyanogen OS with us anymore, but you still get Oxygen OS and Hydrogen OS for the device. Although, installing Hydrogen OS straightaway via recovery may not go well but you know there’s good community out there for OnePlus devices and thanks to user thebuginyou there’s already a ROM you can install on your OnePlus 2 to get Hydrogen OS along with a OTA update.

Let’s get started..

Install Hydrogen OS on OnePlus 2

To install Hydrogen OS on OnePlus 2 in markets other than China, you need to unlock bootloader on your OP2 and install TWRP recovery to be able to flash Hydrogen OS and Gapps .zip files.

Step 1: Unlock bootloader

Unlocking bootloader on OnePlus 2 is pretty simple and very much like that of Nexus devices. Below is a detailed guide to help you:

[icon name=”hand-o-right” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] How to Unlock Bootloader on OnePlus 2

Step 2: Install TWRP Recovery

Once you’ve the bootloader unlocked on your OnePlus 2, go ahead and install TWRP recovery via Fastboot. Follow the link below for OP2 compatible TWRP recovery build and installation instructions.

[icon name=”hand-o-right” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] How to Install TWRP Recovery on OnePlus 2

Step 3: Install Hydrogen OS

Now that you’ve bootloader unlocked and TWRP recovery installed you can finally install Hydrogen OS on your non-chinese OnePlus 2 device.

Grab the Hydrogen OS file along with the OTA update and Gapps from the download link below and transfer the files to your OnePlus 2.

[icon name=”download” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] Downloads: Hydrogen OS  |  OTA Update  |  Gapps (.zip files)

Once you’ve the three files above transferred to your OP2, boot into TWRP recovery and take a nandroid backup of your current OS (that is, Oxygen OS) so you can revert back to Oxygen OS easily should things go wrong.

To install Hydrogen OS do a factory reset first and then flash the .zip files you downloaded above in the following order: Hydrogen OS » OTA update » Gapps. Wipe cache again after flashing all the files and then do a reboot.

If you need detailed help using TWRP recovery for flashing a custom ROM, check out this guide.

That’s all. If you followed the instructions correctly, Hydrogen OS should be flawlessly running on your non-chinese OnePlus 2. Cheers!

Happy Androiding!

via xda