Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsNot the OnePlus I Once Knew
Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2023
For a while now, I've maintained that OnePlus and the Google Pixel range are the only good Android phones on the market. You might guess that I'm a fan of having a "pure" Android experience on my devices, and you'd be right. If you are like me and think that using a Samsung phone with all the "value-added" bloat is a torturous experience, then I'm sorry to say that I believe OnePlus is clearly going down that route.
The moment I started setting up the phone, I could tell something wasn't right. There was too much flashy nonsense, but I got to the end of the setup and started looking around. Almost nothing is vanilla; you've got OnePlus's special homescreen, their icons, their apps, their theme. They've got "wonderful" value-added features that you can, admittedly, turn some of them off in the settings. But once you explore some more, you find a bunch of totally useless bloat.
At the same time, while there's some bloat, it's still surprising how they manage to ruin Android such that right from the beginning, you notice pointless battery drain that shouldn't be happening. Not to mention, if you dig a little deeper, you'll find out about the stuff under the hood, OnePlus's special throttling, and you can read about their well-known benchmark manipulation and so on.
Take a peek at forums, and you'll see people complaining about constant instability and old bugs never addressed, updates rolling out so slowly that some people only get an update after the subsequent version has already come out. Even for security updates, which frankly should be a big deal, they are still rolled out slower than they should be. The entire point of security updates for Android is that they're important, they're time-sensitive, and they're easy to implement, right?
So, if you want this phone because you think you're going to get something like a vanilla or "pure" Android experience, please don't bother. In fact, just get a Samsung instead if you're willing to deal with annoying bloat. At least in that case, the hardware is better. OnePlus isn't even cheap anymore, anyway.
