Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now it’s official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets.
Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion. As part of the proactive global strategy adjustment, OnePlus has decided to conclude new product rollouts in Europe and North America.
↫ OnePlus statement
Once OnePlus’ co-founder Carl Pei left the company (and founded Nothing), things have been feeling shaky for OnePlus, once the undisputed darling of the more technical part of the Android crowd. Their phones got more expensive, their minimalist, close-to-stock Android version got progressively worse, and they started lagging in updates, too. My OnePlus Watch 3, for instance, which was promised to get WearOS 6 at some point, but never got it – meanwhile, WearOS 7 has already been released. No, this news is not particularly surprising.
Luckily, the company claims it will honour its warranty and update support obligations for existing products in Europe and the US, which is nice, but also something they’re legally obligated to do (at least in the EU). A snag here is that the only update path the company offers is to ColorOS, from its parent company Oppo, which many more traditional Android and OnePlus users certainly won’t be happy about. Something is better than nothing, I suppose, and I’ll reserve judgment until I see what ColorOS 17 will be like on my other OnePlus product, a OnePlus Pad 3.
It’s just one more victim of western markets (illegally) consolidating on Apple and Samsung (while a few Pixels rummaging in the margins).
s/exists/exits/ I guess.
(I refrained from typing /exists/s/s//, but still)
Is modern capitalism all about killing the actually good products? Well at least good to know, I was days from buying their phone.
We don’t have capitalism anymore, it died. It was replaced by what some call technofeudalism. There are a number of reasons it’s not just “rentier capitalism” – but rent seeking (instead of profit motive) is one of the main features that make it distinct, and these platforms (and the need for platform capture) enables that rent seeking/gatekeeping behavior. It’s not capitalism anymore. Everyone is so behind on this.
“It’s just one more victim of western markets (illegally) consolidating on Apple and Samsung (while a few Pixels rummaging in the margins).”
I think this is too lazy a conclusion. I am on my 4th Samsung phone, and every time i got a new one, i checked the market to look for an alternative first. Yet, every time i ended up with a new Samsung again, even though i felt it was a boring choice, but they consistently made the overall best package to my taste. I can’t say if this would be true every year, but at least it was the 4 years where i bought one. (s4, s7, s10, s22)
I have been privileged enough to be able to afford high end phones, but even if i was to buy a more budget one today, as far as i can tell only Samsung and Google are promising at least 6 years of software upgrades.
The full package matters. This is also why i believe Chinese car brands are having a hard time competing in Europe except at the budget end.
I had a second hand OnePlus 7T Pro (complete with a pop-up camera – whatever happened to those?) and once I put a custom ROM on it, it was pretty good. I think it was the last of their range to have a 100% display – after that we got holes in the display which I loathe intensely. I switched recently to a second hand Xperia 1 III for £150 with LineageOS 23 and Nova Launcher – even better than the 7T Pro (was an insane £1199 new – Sony just price themselves out of the market really). I do think the 7T Pro was the peak of the OnePlus phone line – it was all downhill after that.
There is little to no innovations in phones.
It’s camera/battery/screen and that iterate each version
The qwerty phones are just not competitive with an s26
Flip phones are interesting, but the form factor hasn’t been embraced.
OnePlus are just another generic in the mix with Xiaomi and other mega brands that can undercut Samsung in hardware by cutting corners in software.
Im hoping the new laws coming require replacement batteries will bring a new wave ala Fairphone. But as this isn’t in the companies interests. I expect more of the same
I miss the old Nokia. I used it a lot as a handheld computer, so my main phone was a 9210i for quite a few years. A friend of mine got obsessed with having a camera in his pocket since the 7650, so that was his form factor of choice. My sister couldn’t take headphones out of her ears, so she always got the ones with FM radio + music player focus. My last Nokia was an E65, chosen because it had wifi (I had just moved abroad, and used it for skype calls from a public library) and yet remained small. At some point, I got a bluetooth GPS and used Nokia Maps a lot.
You could really find a phone that was good for what you needed it for, in all sizes, shapes and form factors. Battery life was never poor and Nokia took design risks. There were many flops, but they were not afraid of trying.
There were quite a few nice pastime games and good CalDAV/CardDAV support, too. App discoverability was very poor but you could find what you needed.
Sadly, there seems to be some pretty big carve-outs for the regulation. Phones with an IP67 or greater rating won’t need user replaceable batteries as long as they maintain greater than 83% capacity after 500 charge cycle, and 80% capacity after 1,000 charges. They only have to ensure availability to professional repairers.
Given the European and UK push for digital sovereignty I’d love this to extend to European phone platforms – imagine mandating banks to support Sailfish OS it would make the platform really compelling, suddenly a market for supporting devices (Nokia/HMD again)? and modem/chip manufacturers giving credible support.