OnePlus was once widely seen as a rebel in the smartphone industry. One with a genuine cause. It was the classic underdog story where a startup comes out of nowhere and rattles the biggies. Gives power back to the citizens. It did not do it once, but multiple times, and it did it all well enough —until it changed course a bit.
Over its 10-year-long journey, this Oppo subsidiary made some fantastic products. It also had its fair share of controversies. And it finds itself smack in the middle of a new one now.
The OnePlus 12R, its latest phone, was falsely advertised to come with UFS4.0 storage when in fact it uses the slower UFS3.1. It was actually a Reddit user who pointed out the mistake first, not OnePlus. All of its marketing materials and product listings mentioned wrong information.
OnePlus acknowledged the “error” and apologised for the “miscommunication” only a few days after sales began and after social media went berserk with people calling it a scam and demanding a refund for buyers.
As OnePlus finds itself in news again for wrong reasons, here’s a look at five of its biggest controversies:
- The Cyanogen snub— Did you know that OnePlus was banned from selling its debut smartphone, the OnePlus One, in India, for some time? The jury is still out on who’s to blame, but Cyanogen, the American company behind CyanogenMod, struck a deal with Micromax giving the homegrown brand exclusive rights to use its software and the legal battle that ensued, forced OnePlus to pause sales and start thinking of a plan B. It took 5 months to sort everything out but the future of OnePlus already felt in disarray. It was a small startup after all, even if it came from inside the behemoth BBK Electronics. But it bounced back with OxygenOS.
- To USB or not to USB, that is the question— The very next year, OnePlus was caught bundling USB accessories that did not in fact conform to the USB specifications at that time with smartphones. After a lot of customer hue and cry on OnePlus forums and Reddit and a full review of what was actually going on inside them by Google engineer Benson Leung, co-founder Carl Pei (who later left the company to build another startup by the name of Nothing), admitted that their cables and adapters did not conform to the USB standard. A refund was initiated.
- Fast and smooth, but at what cost— Days after its official merger with Oppo, OnePlus was caught throttling the performance of some apps on the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro. Andrei Frumusanu from AnandTech found clinching evidence that OnePlus was deliberately slowing down Google Chrome and other popular applications on the OnePlus 9. Frumusanu also found that in many instances the Google Chrome application was relying only on Cortex-A55 cores for its operations ignoring the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888’s major computing horsepower, effectively turning out to be slower in comparison to other applications. The throttling however was not observed while running benchmarks which is to say, their scores would indicate faster performance (Geekbench also took heed of the situation and banned the OnePlus 9 phones from its list). OnePlus later admitted that it was indeed manipulating performance of as many as 300 apps on the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro making them run slower than others in order to reduce power consumption.
- 5G through OTA. Wait, what? Okay, this one’s probably the most ridiculous and we have an inkling that it was all made up but in 2021, a rumour broke that some OnePlus customer care executive had confirmed to someone that the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro will support more 5G bands through a software update (they did in fact only two, N41 and N78, at launch). Of course, it was later clarified that, that won’t be the case with OnePlus clearly stating the obvious — “No, this is not possible to update via software in the future.”
- Does OnePlus 12 support eSIM? Yes and no, but mostly no: OnePlus made one more error with the OnePlus 12 series, but unlike the 12R storage mishap, it did not admit to it. Not yet anyway. The OnePlus 12 was supposed to support eSIM connectivity in India, or at least that is what the product page communicated initially. One buyer actually purchased the phone “with the understanding that it includes eSIM support, and this feature is crucial for my daily use.” Within the same OnePlus forum thread, another buyer wrote, “I initially contacted support and they claimed that the OnePlus 12 does not support eSIM. However, after I presented a screenshot showing otherwise, they acknowledged the support for eSIM. Despite this, they seemed unsure about the specifics of how the feature operates.” The OnePlus 12 product page has been updated to confirm the phone does not support eSIM in India.
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