OnePlus had announced the OnePlus 6 in India yesterday with 3 color variants with 2 storage options and a limited edition Marvel Avengers Edition. Last week Google announced Android P beta at its Google I/O event for Google Pixel as well as a few more partner OEM’s where OnePlus being one of them. And soon after the Google I/O, OnePlus had announced the availability of Android P Beta on its upcoming OnePlus 6 Android smartphone but no timeline was shared about the availability of Android P. And yesterday during the OnePlus 6 India launch, when asked about the availability of Android P Public Beta, we were told that it will be available in next 2-3 weeks. But today OnePlus has announced that the Android P Beta for OnePlus 6 is available right away to download and users can flash it as soon as they get their devices starting May 21st.
We all know how much developers love OnePus devices as OnePlus has a history as well of supporting the custom development community with easily unlocked bootloaders and fast release of kernel sources and device trees. The OnePlus 6 release appears to be no different, as OnePlus says they have already released kernel sources for the new device before devices have even started shipping. And now with Android P available right before the official availability of the device, it makes the OnePlus 6 even more lucrative.
Installing Android P beta on the OnePlus 6 in simple and just follow the steps listed on the OnePlus official forum and make sure to follow all the steps carefully. Just in case you somehow have the OnePlus 6, you can download the Android P Beta ROM from here and don’t forget to report any bugs here.
Remember, this is a public beta and you can expect a lot of bugs and it might not be a good idea to flash it on your daily driver device. As reported by OnePlus there are a number of issues with the Android P beta on the OnePlus 6, but none which we can expect to see in the final release which launches later this year. OnePlus says that VoLTE does not work, nor does camera slow motion, face unlock, or Widevine L1 DRM. Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi SoftAP device manager are also slightly broken. Apart from this, it should run well enough for developers to run so they can test their applications against the latest API level.
