OxygenOS 15 dropped parallel apps and the work profile partition without warning, and the response from the community was immediate. Users reported losing functionality they relied on daily, and the replies from OnePlus amounted to "trust us, it's better now." That answer has never been good enough from any OEM and it shouldn't start here.
Custom ROM development on OnePlus hardware has gotten harder with each generation as the boot chain locks down further. The argument that locked bootloaders protect users from security threats falls apart when you notice that same threat model permits carrier bloatware to persist untouched. Nobody protecting you, just limiting what you can do with your own hardware.
The "never settle" slogan feels like a punchline now. Each release removes something instead of adding it. Screen-off gestures vanish. The shelf gets rebranded and buried. The bootloader remains locked on carrier variants despite years of community requests. At some point the pattern stops being coincidence.
OnePlus is not unique in this. Most Android OEMs treat customization as a feature to phase out rather than a reason people buy their hardware. The difference is that OnePlus built its early reputation on being different, which makes the retreat more visible and the disappointment more acute. When a company starts from a position of claimed openness, closing down hurts more than if it never opened at all.
Support windows vary wildly across carrier and unlocked variants of the same device. Users who bought an unlocked OnePlus 12 expecting uniform updates got a different experience depending on where they purchased it. That fragmentation punishes people for trying to make an informed purchase. When did buying a phone require reading the fine print on your carrier's update agreement?
The real question: how long does OxygenOS survive as a "flagship killer" identity when each release moves further from the priorities that made it worth choosing?
#TechLiberation #FOSS #Privacy #Android #OxygenOS
To me OnePlus died when they strayed from their original methodology. I got the OnePlus One because it felt like a very pro-consumer phone. The phone itself was more or less on-par with flagships at the time, but because of the way they marketed and sold it, it was available at a really affordable pricepoint. The OS itself was CyanogenMod (later forked into a project calling itself LineageOS), and things were unlocked for tinkerers to plod around with.
I used this phone up until about 2020, where it wasn't functional enough anymore and I replaced it. At the time, no Android phone around would be supported by the manufacturer for that long. I hated changing phones. I settled for a refurbished iPhone XS because Apple did offer first-party support for 6-7 years, and then security patches past that.
That was the whole origin of the "flagship killer" idea. A smaller company pushed a phone that could stand toe to toe with Samsung and Apple in terms of specs, showing that when you buy these other phones, you're not really paying for hardware, it's all the faff around it.
OnePlus ditched that really fast, however.