It may be near impossible to obtain a OnePlus One right now, but that hasn’t prevented the folks behind the Team Win Recovery Project from announcing the handset’s first custom recovery. The release will allow the first OnePlus One owners to start flashing custom ROMs and tweaks to their device as soon as the first batch is shipped next month.

With the initial batch of OnePlus One invites going out in around a week, the OnePlus and CyanogenMod team have been hard at work on squashing all the bugs present in the phone. Initial reviews of the OnePlus One suggested that while it aces a suite of benchmarks, it has some stability issues with the pre-loaded firmware being pretty buggy.

The team is now rolling out the final version of CyanogenMod 11S to the handset, which fixes all the bugs reported by users and enhances a few other features.

Still waiting for your invite to buy the OnePlus One? So are plenty of others. Not even competition winners have received theirs yet. But don’t worry — they are on the way. In an update on its official forum, OnePlus promises an invite “storm” is on its way next month.

The OnePlus One’s Camera and Gallery apps have been (unofficially) made available to download for other Android-powered smartphones. They’re based on the stock CyanogenMod 11 apps, which are based on the stock Android 4.4 KitKat apps — but they offer some nifty features that you don’t get direct from Google.

We all knew the OnePlus One was going to be cheap — for a flagship phone, at least. But I don’t think any of us anticipated it would start at as little as $299 off-contract when competing devices — such as the Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M8 — cost around $600. So, how has OnePlus made its debut smartphone such a bargain?

It hasn’t skimped on build quality or specifications, that’s for sure. What it has done is pass up the opportunity to make any kind of profit. The Chinese startup won’t make a penny when you buy its first device because they’re all sold at cost.