SMARTPHONES
The Fall of OnePlus
A lesson on unsustainable promises.
The journey of OnePlus is a fairly well-known tale of success, a rags to riches story if you will. Two guys named Carl Pei and Pete Lau start a company called OnePlus to produce phones that beat the prices of flagships whilst offering up great value in its features.
And what they set out to do, they achieved — the OnePlus One, their very first phone, was an instant hit in the tech enthusiast community. With an exclusive invite system to get the phone, OnePlus rode the wave of hype that came its way, with marketing campaigns such as the “Smash the Past” campaign, which saw 140,000 entrants destroy their phone in hopes of being able to purchase the OnePlus One for just $1 USD.
Then, of course, there was the OnePlus slogan, which was used consistently throughout their marketing and was claimed to be part of their company vision.
Never Settle
The highly successful launch of the OnePlus One was followed by the OnePlus Two — which, despite the lack of NFC, was also well received. This was released through the invite system as well. However, the launch of the OnePlus Two also showed some of the shortcomings of OnePlus — with Carl Pei making a public apology about the delayed shipping times.
They also fell short with the OnePlus Two on software updates, promising 2 years of updates with an upgrade to Android 7 Nougat, eventually leaving OnePlus Two users on Android 6. We’re going to see this happen some more down the line, in more recent times.
The OnePlus X was released in 2015, and it was OnePlus’ very first attempt at entering the budget market — it wasn’t anything amazing, but it was received fairly well.
The OnePlus 3 and 3T came and went in 2016— arguably OnePlus’ magnum opus — it was one of the highest bang for your buck phones of 2016. With great hardware, the best Android skin for enthusiasts (Oxygen OS), and features like the patented Dash Charge, it was considered one of the best phones of the year.
Expanding their market to Australia for the first (and last) time, the OnePlus 5 came out in 2017, which was followed later that year by the OnePlus 5T. These phones built upon the groundwork that had been laid by the previous phones, adding a sleeker, higher quality build and better cameras. Whilst there was the QC issue of jelly-scrolling, the phone as a whole was great.
And…this is where the phones started to go down in value.
Looking at it, we can see three main causes for these issues.
1. A Disconnect From Their Userbase
If you take a minute to watch the commercial above (from 4 years ago), you’ll notice the heavy emphasis on community involvement in ‘the process’ of making a OnePlus phone and improving it — to quote the video description:
“At OnePlus, we create together. Hand-in-hand with our users, we invent, develop, and challenge the way tech works.”
And this was true for a long time — since OnePlus was known mostly exclusively in the tech enthusiast circles, the company took the time to listen to its community; they listened closely to feature requests, complaints, and other feedback — all of which helped OnePlus tailor the phone to its users in a way that we haven’t seen done by a smartphone company before.
Yet, in recent times OnePlus has been steering further and further away from listening to their customers. This is most likely due to how OnePlus has greatly expanded its market to more ‘regular’ consumers as such, with sales through Verizon and T-Mobile.
Whilst OnePlus is continuing to grow as a company and is getting more exposure to a wider audience, it’s lost a great number of its original fans — the ones who helped the company grow in the first place.
A great example of this was the decision to remove the headphone jack from the OnePlus 6T.
Whilst, today, in 2021, virtually no modern smartphone has a headphone jack and most people have accepted it, enthusiasts back then still wanted the 3.5 mm port.
Another example is when OnePlus started pre-installing Facebook on new OnePlus phones — something that OnePlus fans weren’t too happy about, causing enough backlash for OnePlus to stop.
But the truth is, OnePlus has grown large enough to be able to ignore its original userbase and still make a good profit — I suppose then, it’s always been an inevitability that OnePlus would get to this point.
2. Losing Focus
Wonder why OnePlus used to be able to beat out the competition in price, yet stand toe to toe with them? It’s because they were focussed.
They focussed on what matters most. They didn’t try and cram in gimmicks like the controversial colour filter, they didn’t try and slap on a big brand name on their otherwise average cameras — instead, they made sure that they got the fundamentals right.
Good peripherals ✅
Optimised software ✅
Fast hardware ✅
Fast updates ✅
Good camera ✅
In other words, they covered all the bases fairly equally, and this worked well in giving the user a high-value phone.
Now, however, the company prioritises …other things.
OnePlus used to be one of the best when it came to software updates, now you’ve got updates arriving a year late.
OnePlus used to give you a decent camera for the price point, now it gives you a decent camera with a Hasselblad logo slapped on it for nearly flagship price.
OnePlus used to be open and honest with their community, now they’ve been caught throttling normal apps and only performing well in un-blacklisted or benchmarking apps, leading to Geekbench delisting them.
I think I’ve made my point…
The company simply seems to have completely changed its priorities, and with the recent further integration of Oppo and OnePlus, as well as the exit of co-founder Carl Pei, I expect that we’ll be seeing more disappointing choices by OnePlus.
3. It’s been outclassed by the competition
The competitive edge that OnePlus once had is gone.
All sorts of companies have come in to fill the hole in the market that OnePlus used to fill: Google, with their Pixel 4a, Poco (the once-Xiaomi sub-brand), Asus and many more.
Hell, even the iPhone, which was usually known to be extremely expensive, has entered the midrange market with their very competitive iPhone SE 2.
In the software department, where OnePlus used to be the best blend of stock Android and custom features, it has now gotten similar enough, design-language wise to OneUI that you would probably just be better off using OneUI, given how competitive Samsung’s skin has gotten in terms of features.
And now with the further integration between Oppo and OnePlus, it’s a very real possibility that Oxygen OS will be replaced by Oppo’s ColorOS, which would further remove the appeal and value of getting a OnePlus smartphone in the first place. In fact, in China ColorOS has already completely replaced Hydrogen OS (the Chinese variant of Oxygen OS) on OnePlus phones, so chances are the rest of the world’s OnePlus phones will soon be receiving this.
UPDATE: Further integration between Oxygen OS and ColorOS has begun outside of China, namely on the recent OnePlus Nord 2. According to 9to5Google, the reviewer’s guide for the phone briefly mentioned that the phone was running “OxygenOS based on Android 11/Color OS 11.3”. In simple terms, on the Nord 2, OxygenOS is a skin on top of a skin.
The flagship killer has been killed.
In defence of OnePlus, it’s a business — the end goal is to make a profit, and considering that sales-wise they seem to be doing great, they’re not going to change direction any time soon.
As consumers, the lesson that we can take away from the story of OnePlus is that, as TechAltar once said,
Enthusiast brands will betray you.
That is to say, we shouldn’t buy products based on promises.
OnePlus is a clear example of why.
