- I've added up to here with this.
(swoosh effects) With what?
With this!
Being old enough to remember
when OnePlus stood for well designed phones
with clean software, at rock bottom prices.
It's been painful for me
watching their slow descent into mediocrity.
And it's high time that I share my thoughts.
The one-time flagship killer
has been plagued by hardware issues,
software glitches, and, most damningly, lackluster support
for the enthusiast users who made them what they are today.
What the heck happened?
I used to rely on OnePlus as my recommendation go to
for friends and family alike.
The one company, shh, other than that one,
that I could count on for years
of intuitive software updates and trouble free operation.
Then in the last couple of years,
I've ended up in the doghouse twice
over OnePlus recommendations.
First, with my son, which is bad enough.
Then with my wife, which is much, much worse.
So now to make it up to her,
I'm gonna have to buy her something nice
with this money from our sponsor.
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- While I've been personally frustrated for a while,
it was an exchange with our good friend,
Steve, from GamersNexus that pushed me
from I'm not recommending these to friends anymore
to I need to make a video about this.
It appears that certain models of OnePlus phones
have been afflicted by a strange bug
that causes their storage to fill up
at an alarming rate, intriguing.
Now the obvious solution
would be to delete some cat pictures,
but if user reports are anything to go by
not even a complete purge
of precious memories of Snowball I
is enough to free up the space.
And in fact, there's no indication within the UI
of what is consuming all of the storage.
Even factory resetting these devices yielded no improvement.
So to diagnose what's going on here
we need to go to the device logs.
Logs are a record of diagnostic data
and they can include information
about operating system updates,
app crashes, physical errors,
anything that could help
to troubleshoot a device that isn't functioning correctly.
Only, we've got a problem.
This log data, on Android, isn't available to end users,
at least not out of the box.
Thankfully, OnePlus has still got one thing right.
They're one of the only Android phone makers
who still allow adventurous users
to tinker under Android's hood by rooting their device.
This process comes with enough risk
that most manufacturers will actually void your warranty
just for attempting it.
But it also has some benefits,
including granting complete access
to the phone's file system.
And it was in these typically hidden system folders
that a few brave enthusiasts
came across some modem log files or dumps
that were pretty suspicious.
For starters, they were big,
hundreds of megabytes in some cases,
which is a lot of text.
But your phone generating big log dumps
isn't itself a problem.
It's when it doesn't clean up after itself.
And that's exactly what happened here.
Affected users discovered
that OnePlus' historically well managed OxygenOS
was simply leaving these logs to pile up
until there was no storage left for anything else.
Well, great.
Now that we know what the problem is,
it's an easy fix, right?
Mm, not exactly.
While rooting is an option for OnePlus users,
it comes with a plethora of inconveniences.
First and foremost, being that many apps,
including banking and entertainment apps,
will simply refuse to run if they detect a rooted device.
Not a great workaround.
It also doesn't change the fact that your system
is still dumping these large files into storage
on a consistent basis.
It's like, okay,
there's a hole on your ship, but don't worry.
This bucket will save the day, dumb.
We tried reaching out to OnePlus about the problem.
And a couple of weeks later we finally got a reply
indicating that they are aware of the issue
and have been working to fix it,
which I mean is okay,
except that there are complaints about this
going back as far as mid 2021,
with OnePlus reps at times giving users the runaround
or even ghosting them entirely.
We would never ghost our floatplane.com subscribers.
Check it out for behind the scenes and outtakes.
Now, in fairness to the reps,
if my recent experience is anything to go by,
OnePlus' software team has plenty of other bugs to squash.
Here's one that persisted on my wife's phone for months.
Okay, in fairness,
the arrow is within about the same area code
but she's gonna need a bit more accuracy than this
if she's gonna end up on the right off ramp, hey?
My son's deal breaker issue was an even stupider one.
His phone got an update that completely broke data access
on the Telus mobile network.
Oh, no problem, I thought.
I'll just go edit the APN settings
and, nope, OnePlus actually grays out these buttons,
making them impossible to click on.
The most ridiculous thing
about this seemingly arbitrary interface decision
is that the functions behind the grayed-out buttons
still work.
So the workaround for me
was to use this third-party shortcut manager app
to jump to those settings directly,
bypassing the grayed-out button.
Et, viola, the settings can be changed.
I mean, come on.
Even Apple gives access to APN settings, OnePlus.
It is basic functionality,
like the wan hoodie's super secure phone pocket.
Get yours today at lttstore.com.
- I can't recommend putting one of these in it though.
Since Linus gave me this phone a year ago,
I've had my camera app refuse to open until I restart,
but then it breaks again
the minute my kids do something cute.
I've also had problems with picture messages
for three months before they finally patched that.
And probably the weirdest one
was that I couldn't answer phone calls.
It's intermittent.
So I couldn't catch it on camera,
but the green button to answer calls just wouldn't register,
which is pretty important for, you know, a phone.
They are losing me too.
I can't say I've ever had my actual phone app not work,
but I've got my own problems.
The most maddening one is the app switcher.
Look at this.
If I go to click on the previous opened app,
it reopens the app I was just using,
instead of opening the app I clicked on.
I use the switcher dozens of times a day.
So if you're starting to notice gray hairs
that could be it.
My ambient light sensor can take ages
to adjust in dark areas.
And I've had camera problems too.
After the Android 11 update,
I noticed that the images were being overprocessed
to the point where pictures of my son
looked like he had the life sucked out of him.
And I also noticed some odd fingerprint scanner behavior
where it sometimes won't even pop up.
- Of course, every phone has bugs, some of them lots.
So why are we picking on OnePlus?
It's because they promised to be something different.
And their fall from grace has left a hole
both in the market and in our hearts.
(bell dings)
Okay, as cheesy as that is,
we're not the only ones who have noticed.
In early 2021, MKBHD uploaded a video titled,
What Happened to OnePlus?
His ultimate conclusion was that they didn't really change
but rather they outgrew their initial role
as the enthusiast focused flagship killer subbrand
for parent company BBK.
He lamented their price creep
and the design compromises that they've made
to appeal to the mainstream.
But he understood that business units have to be profitable
and expressed a careful optimism
about a potential return to form.
And he could still be right.
All the right ingredients are still there.
And many of their big announcements since then
around pooling resources between OnePlus and OPPO
have been, yeah, and, moments for people like me,
who knew that co-founder Pete Lau's previous role
was as a VP at OPPO,
and also that (laughs) they never really left.
OPPO and OnePlus are both subsidiaries of BBK.
So with all the pieces still in place
and nothing really changed, why are they struggling?
My diagnosis is that it's a matter of focus.
OPPO and OnePlus phones
have run similar hardware since day zero.
I mean, BBKs different brands are literally only separated
by curtains on the production floor.
So it was always the software that set OnePlus apart.
It was that obsessive attention to system responsiveness
and to meaningful modifications,
to an otherwise mostly stock Android experience.
So why has that changed?
Well, there was a leadership shake up,
and while neither has addressed the alleged conflict
that caused fellow co-founder Carl Pei to leave,
he ended up founding his own company, Nothing.
It was pretty clear during the awkward transition period
where Mr. Lau gradually took on a more public facing role,
that the rift between them was a long time brewing.
If I had to guess what happened, I would say it was probably
over controversial ideas like merging OPPO's,
from my personal experience, worst ColorOS software
with OnePlus', really excellent, OxygenOS.
But as an outsider, it's hard to say for sure.
After all, it is Pete Lau, not Carl Pei,
who is credited with bringing Cyanogenmod,
the clean, mostly stock open source Android skin,
that eventually became LineageOS to OPPO in the first place.
Bottom line, like Marques, I'm still rooting for them.
And there is tons of time left to write the ship,
but it's clear that they need to get their head in the game,
especially when it comes to software.
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Thanks for watching.
Let us know in the comments
how your experience has been with OnePlus.
Has it gotten better or worse over the years?
If you're looking for something else to watch,
check out our recent TechLinked videos,
where we discussed
how apple still has no USB-C on their upcoming iPhones,
but how the European union may force them to
within the next couple of years.
(upbeat music)