Hey OnePlus, it was never about the crime, it was about the cover up

Playing the system through increased benchmarks, hardware compromises or software tricks has become commonplace in recent years. However, the latest reveal on the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro is still terrifying.

The Shenzhen-based sub-brand Oppo has been caught red-handed (again) and is cheating on its performance stats. The difference, however, is that unlike other cases, OnePlus didn’t improve the benchmark results. Instead, the company has throttled apps on the OnePlus 9 Pro to extend battery life.

In a statement after Anandtech Discovering this shady behavior, the company said it has indeed “tweaked” performance by identifying popular apps and tailoring their performance needs to their cores. In addition, OnePlus confirmed that the situation could affect some benchmarks, but said the goal is to improve device performance for users, not to cheat.

Popular benchmarks like Geekbench have since ditched the OnePlus 9 Pro for fraud because the benchmark performance doesn’t indicate actual capabilities in the real world.

The long and the short of it? OnePlus maintains a system-wide app list that bans most of the top 300 apps in the Play Store to the significantly slower Cortex-A55 cores of the OnePlus 9 Pro. This is a phone that has spent over $ 1,000 because it promises state-of-the-art specifications and superior speed.

This isn’t the first time smartphone brands have embarked on a devious avenue of controlling power, thermal output, or battery usage. Last year, Apple spent $ 113 million to resolve lawsuits related to its practice of slowing down phones to ensure longer battery life. Unless Apple slowed down old Phones to extend their lifespan. OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro are now the latest and greatest of the top class smartphones from OnePlus.

The problem isn’t necessarily slowing down apps in the name of optimization. Personally, I agree with this compromise.

Before you get the pitchforks out, hear me out.

Launched in March, the OnePlus 9 Pro has been on the market for a few months now. Our OnePlus 9 Pro review raved about the phone’s performance, despite pointing out that it tends to heat up and the battery life isn’t quite up to date. When you explore Reddit or the OnePlus forums, you will have a hard time finding people complaining about day-to-day performance.

There is no naked eye evidence that the OnePlus 9 Pro is suffering from any form of power throttling. In fact, I’ve been using the phone as my daily driver since it was first launched and never once thought it was lacking in performance. For context, I’m the guy with over 40 Chrome tabs and 300+ apps on my phone.

Does throttling mean anything if there is no noticeable loss of performance? If anything, this is a sign that OnePlus is effectively optimizing the phone for its users. But that doesn’t mean I agree with the deception.

I could talk about OnePlus’ incompetence to properly set the phone up. In a virtual water cooler chat, Android Authority Robert Triggs added that the Snapdragon 888’s Cortex-X1 chip is literally designed to handle heavy temporary loads. Switch on, end task, switch off. Simple in theory, but less so in practice if the OnePlus solution is to be considered.

Continue reading: Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Deep Dive: Everything You Need To Know

The “solution” from OnePlus for the high battery consumption is, to put it simply, a way out. Rather than investing the work and resources it takes to actually optimize it, the company’s decision to reduce the power consumption of apps is cheeky to say the least. It stinks of incompetence. It’s almost like OnePlus got a last minute reveal that the phone wasn’t working the way it should and took the fastest route.

The whole affair speaks of the industry’s over-focus on hardware – pick up the fastest chip you can buy and call it the day. Get the marketing going. But a phone is more than the sum of its parts, and software is just as important, if not more important, than the silicon it runs on.

It’s easy to build a fast phone; It’s easy to build a long-lasting phone. But a phone that balances both? This is heavy, and the OnePlus 9 Pro is proof of that.

When fading out the gimped performance, the question also arises: What has the OnePlus 9 Pro saved on? Was there a lack of heat dissipation or is Oxygen OS just too unoptimized to balance performance and performance? And what about the newfangled LTPO display that was supposed to reduce power consumption?

The bigger problem here is the lack of transparency and control. OnePlus hid the worrying fact that users were not taking full advantage of a phone advertised for its performance.

After all, it suggests that you don’t need the kind of performance that these chipsets put out. But why then use the expensive Snapdragon 888 at all instead of using a cheaper SoC and passing the savings on to customers?

Worse still, the company made a conscious decision not to throttle benchmark apps, which further increased the smoke and mirrors. Such a deception sets bad precedent for other brands, and OnePlus needs to be challenged.

It also raises questions about longevity. So far we don’t know if OnePlus is using a constantly updated list of target apps. What happens two years later? As apps become more sophisticated, they are likely to require more power. Does OnePlus expect buyers to replace the phone every two years? You can see how quickly the conversation can descend into the rabbit hole of forced obsolescence.

For a phone that starts at a staggering $ 1,000, it’s also amazing how little control you have over it. As smartphone processors get more powerful, they inevitably get hotter and heavier. But here’s the kicker: Cell phones like the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra get along well with energy profiles that you can use to optimize performance or reduce battery life. It is really that easy.

Satisfying yourself with less seems to have become a recurring theme on OnePlus phones as the gap between marketing and product reality grows larger. This latest deception is just another in a string of disappointments following the much-touted Hasselblad partnership that helped OnePlus catch up but failed to deliver outstanding camera performance. The decision to throttle performance is another slap in the face of the enthusiasts and fans who helped build the brand.

Do I expect OnePlus to do the right thing from its customers? No not true. The company has made it clear that mid-range and mainstream phones are its future. But the deception tells a cautionary story never to take marketing at face value. After all, it is a business and companies optimize for the lowest cost.

Balancing full throttle performance with battery life and heat would have required a lot more resources, so OnePlus took a shortcut. When you consider that almost no one noticed the deception, it clearly worked. If you really notice problems, OnePlus is ready to sell you another phone.

What about you? Would you buy a phone knowing you weren’t really getting the hardware you paid the highest price for?