If you have been following the Cyanogen/OnePlus story then you will know that things are not very good between the two camps. In the last few days, OnePlus was instructed to refrain from selling, shipping and marketing Cyanogen branded devices in India by a New Delhi court. This was due to an exclusivity deal between Cyanogen and Micromax for the rights to CyanogeOS in India. We reported this morning that the court documents highlighted a number of emails between the two companies showing that their relationship was becoming increasingly strained. If you missed this morning's article, you can read it by clicking here. However, the important part was a string of emails sent between the two. These were dated November 17th and ran through to November 26th. Basically, a week or two before the OnePlus One was supposed to debut in India.

As a result, it was presumed that the relationship between the two started to become frayed only recently. However, we have now received information that suggests the straining of the relationship is not a new thing and actually dated back to the summer. Following on from this morning's email revelations, an anonymous source has sent us emails between Cyanogen and OnePlus showing that both parties have struggled to find common ground for months. A lot of the media attention this morning (and the last few days) have focused on Cyanogen and their supposed treatment of OnePlus in the Indian situation. However, the emails we have seen suggest that OnePlus caused a number of the issues which led to the breakdown, such as not being hands-on, not taking part in the development process of the One and effectively leaving Cyanogen to pick up the pieces "Every time we find hardware issues, like all the XXX problems, we get blown off until we take action ourselves. We had to make all the art right down to the wallpapers and media shots. We've had to do damage control on multiple occasions because of pointless stunts".


The emails strongly suggest that OnePlus were more intent on trying to get something quickly to market then something of substance. This in-turn frustrated Cyanogen as they were worried their brand would be demeaned by a product that did not provide users with the experience they expected "It costs us tens of thousands of dollars in bandwidth every time we do an OTA, but we don't care because our name is on the thing and we want a quality product out there".

Now, it is important to remember that the information we have received cannot be verified and unlike the emails we saw this morning are not part of a court issued or legal document. Not to mention, the emails we saw are also not time-stamped and as such we cannot verify when they were originally sent. That said, their content strongly indicates this was during the early release stages of the One due to the various software referencing and so on. Which does tie-in with the summer time we were advised of by our source. It is also worth pointing out that the quoted content included here is only a fraction of the emails we have seen which all generally make the same points. Needless to say, the emails (if true) do clearly highlight that the current issues are not all based down to the India situation, have been a long-time in the making and run far deeper than what the current reports suggest. If or when either Cyanogen or OnePlus respond to the information, we will update you.