Yesterday, the OnePlus and Cyanogen Inc. team started rolling out the 05Q build of CM11S for the OnePlus One. While not Lollipop, the update includes quite a lot of minor but useful features and a bunch of bug fixes that will be greatly appreciated by all One owners. 

Since Cyanogen Inc. is yet to start a wider roll out of the update, chances are most OnePlus One owners are still waiting impatiently for the update to land on their device. Plus, OnePlus One owners in India are not going to receive the update because of Cyanogen Inc’s decision to not provide software support to the handset in the country. This does not mean that you have to be stuck to an older and buggier version of CM11S on your OnePlus One though, since manually sideloading the update on the handset is very easy. Follow the steps below to find out how.

The below guide will work on all the variants of the OnePlus One running CM11S, irrespective of the region they were sold in. While the steps below will not format your phone or touch your data in any way, it is always recommend to create a backup in case things go wrong.

Step 1: Download the ZIP file of the latest OTA from here and place it inside a folder called “one” on your desktop. Make sure to rename the file to “update.zip” to avoid any confusion later on and transfer it the internal storage of your One.

Step 2:  On your OnePlus One, enable ‘Developer Options’ by going to Settings -> About Phone and tapping on ‘Build Number’ seven times. Now head back to Settings -> Developer Options and enable the ‘Advanced Reboot’ menu.

Step 3: Long press the Power button to bring the Power menu and then select the Reboot option from it. From the list that pops up, select the ‘Recovery’ option.

Step 4: Once your device boots into recovery, select the ‘apply update’ option followed by ‘apply from internal storage.’ Then navigate to the “update.zip” file that was transferred to the device in the first step and confirm your selection by pressing the Power button.

Once the ZIP file has been successfully installed, reboot your device from the Recovery menu to enjoy the latest version of CM11S.

The above guide will also work for OnePlus One users who have are running CM11S without any modifications, but have a custom recovery installed. In case your system partition is modified in anyway, it is more than likely that you will get a Status 7 Error. In that case, you can try installing this ZIP file, which has the necessary system checks disabled. Do keep in mind though that there is a slight probability of your device entering into a bootloop if you have made some major modifications to the system partition with this ZIP.

If the above ZIP does not work, you will have to manually flash the system partition from the OnePlus One factory image and then repeat the steps listed above to enjoy the latest version of CM11S on your handset.

Thanks to bestlands for the screenshots!

Update: Cyanogen OS 12 update for the OnePlus One is out. You can find the guide to sideload it here.