It’s no secret that OnePlus is cutting its ties with Cyanogen over the fiasco with Micromax in India. It has been developing its own custom ROM to replace CyanogenMod in its future devices. And while it isn’t yet revealing what that ROM will look like or will offer, it is now announcing its chosen name. Its ROM will be called “Oxygen OS”, at least in the rest of the world. But in China, it will be called Hydrogen instead.
OnePlus is not the first to name their product after the life-sustaining element, and its reasons for doing so will probably echo all those other users. It calls Oxygen the “epitome of simplicity” and speaks to the goals of the ROM: lightweight, pure, and a fundamental building block of everything else. Whether it will be able to measure up to that lofty goal remains to be seen when the Oxygen OS finally does come out.
Quite amusingly, OnePlus will be using a different name in China: Hydrogen OS. The principles, however, remain the same. Hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the world and also serves as a building block for greater things. It is also light and ubiquitous. OnePlus says that there will be differences between local and overseas versions of the OS, hence the need to use a different name to differentiate the names.
Interestingly, OnePlus is using the chemical formula “H2” for Hydrogen. Together with Oxygen, the two would make up H2O, life giving water.
