My worst decision from 2021

At that time, I was aware that OnePlus — the company I once admired — was no longer the same. They suffered from big changes, from the inside, which would naturally make their products different than what they have been until then — an oversight on my part.

One of the things I enjoyed the most about OnePlus’ phones, was the operating system. There’s no denying that the formula OnePlus once had for their OS was a great success — using stock Android and adding just some sprinkles of extra functionality that users actually like and use.

But as you may or may not know, OnePlus is part of a bigger company called BBK Electronics. The interesting thing is that this company also owns a few other phone companies, such as Oppo and Vivo.

It’s easy to imagine that maintaining multiple development and design teams for multiple operating systems is a pain. Especially when they’re all owned by the same parent company — OnePlus phones run on OxygenOS, while Oppo phones run on ColorOS.

It gets even more complex when you realise that in China, OnePlus phones also run on ColorOS. So BBK was maintaining OxygenOS for all their other markets alone. Inevitably, at some point they decided they needed to cut on some costs and OxygenOS would get merged with ColorOS.

To be completely honest, I have no idea where this plan stands at the moment. But I have just become aware of that apparently that’s not happening anymore.

Well, I can’t tell what the future holds for OnePlus, but I can certainly tell about my past and present.

Past

OxygenOS for me has always been about speed and customisation. From gestures that can be performed on the screen while it’s completely off and will trigger an action or open an app. To cherry picking icons from different icon packs and applying them as you please to whatever apps you have on your phone.

These things are what makes your phone yours. Yes, it’s a phone just like all the others, physically speaking, but it acts and looks as you want it to.

Present

My phone — a OnePlus 9 Pro from last year — is currently running on the latest version update that’s currently available — OxygenOS 12.1, which comes with Android 12 under the hood.

While I was eagerly waiting for Android 12, I had no idea I would have the worst experience I ever had with Android phones.

Ever since updating to Android 12 I immediately noticed some issues.

• The custom icons I had applied to certain apps were now gone. Apparently that’s something we can’t do anymore with the default launcher. The overall limitations were so many — for my use case anyway — that I felt the need to go back to Nova Launcher, which I haven’t used in a long time.
• That thing that appears as the leftmost desktop can’t be disabled now — “now” being when I gave up and installed Nova.
• The widgets won’t stretch to the edges of the display anymore.
• The dock only allows for a max of 5 apps now.
• The double tap to wake got extremely pick. In the past I would carelessly double tap it and it would always wake. Right now, I found that I need to make the second tap happen within a very restricted distance from the first tap, otherwise it won’t wake. It’s extremely annoying.
• At some point, I open the camera app only to see that the image was flipped. Also, the whole UI was white, when I had been using dark mode since day 1, which was also not helping. Besides, the image being flipped made the app completely useless, and until I cleaned the cache, it would persist — even after a reboot.
• The ambient light sensor is just… madness. Sometimes out of the blue, it will drastically reduce the screen brightness. So much so that I actually need to make it brighter by hand. I mean, the whole point of auto screen brightness is just so that I don’t have to fiddle with it myself…
• And the worst of it all, for me at least, is the fact that I now can’t disable vibration for alarm clocks, for whatever reason… Waking up to a vibrator next to my ear is not exactly something I would consider pleasant.

OxygenOS was once considered a system known for its customisation features. Turns out that’s not the case anymore, and I just didn’t get the memo. Even Apple is making moves in the opposite direction now!

So I was already quite unhappy with what I got, but I still thought:

Maybe it’s just me. I’m the picky guy…

Then, roughly a month ago and completely out of chance, I stumbled upon this video from Linus Tech Tips, where he goes over the numerous issues he and his family, along with many other internet users have been having with OxygenOS.

I was so happy to see that I’m not the picky one in the end! But still very much disappointed that OnePlus has come to this.

In all fairness, my issues aren’t nearly as problematic or serious as the ones Linus highlights in the video. But are still very much annoying to deal with and definitely feel like a regression from previous OxygenOS versions.

Future

While I can’t tell about OnePlus’ future, I can certainly tell about mine.

As much as I enjoy OnePlus’ phones from a physical point of view, I can see that a device can drastically change the user experience just by updating the software. I mean, the product itself — OnePlus 9 Pro — is very nice to hold, it’s refined, it’s beautiful (the black one) and still has the silent switch — which the most recent OnePlus doesn’t — but at the end of the day, the software is what we interact with most of the time.

So if feels like what I should be looking for instead, is software consistency, I guess? As far as I can tell, the most consistent and stable software I have been using in the past few years comes from a single company — you guessed it: Apple.

I haven’t used an iPhone for almost 10 years. But I have been using macOS for a much longer time. Funnily enough, I have recently decided that my photo editing station would be portable, lightweight and fast, so I got myself an iPad Air — which is actually where I’m writing this post.

Here’s hopping that this turns into another 4 year phone.

I ended my latest post with the statement above, referring to my current phone, hoping it would become another personal record for how long I’ve used a phone. Not only it will not happen, it will also be the phone I’ve used the shortest amount of time.

Again, the hardware is perfectly fine, but the software, and the awful decisions behind it is what’s making me switch so early.

A note for the future:

Making the decision of buying a device based on software features alone can be risky. The hardware won’t change — the lens will remain the same, the buttons’ clickiness will remain the same, the dimensions will remain the same, etc — but the software features can, and most likely will, change. They can either change for the better or for the worse. Is 50% chance of being for the worse too big of a gamble?

As you may have imagined, this is the year I will be going back to an iPhone, and I’m excited to see how my experience will be. I have been using Android phones since 2013, that’s almost a decade! A decade in which I haven’t used an iPhone. My latest iPhone was the iPhone 3GS. A lot has changed since then!

Let’s hope I won’t be bashing on Apple in about 1 year’s time.

Fingers crossed!