OnePlus Throttled Hundreds of Apps to Preserve Battery Life
- OnePlus has lowered the performance of the OnePlus 9 to increase battery life.
- The throttling came in April without warning or informing users of the fact.
- It remains unclear whether OnePlus will bring performance back to normal following the outcry.
After AnandTech noticed that its OnePlus 9 test device wasn’t performing as it should, considering that it runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888, it carried out benchmark tests and figured that some kind of throttling had been silently introduced via an update in April 2021. The company was quick to admit it had to make a decision between better battery life and uncompromising performance and shared the following statement on XDA:
So, what OnePlus says here is that the Snapdragon 888 is so powerful that throttling it by a tiny bit wouldn’t make any practical difference for the users. Still, it would significantly increase the battery life of the device. Sure, this “optimization” would be obvious on benchmarks, but the performance drop would be negligible in most real-life use case scenarios.
This is highly problematic because consumer protection agencies can potentially base actions of customer deception against OnePlus. The throttling came after an initial period of tech reviews that flooded the net, so people have ended up getting something inferior. Even if the firm’s intention was to actually improve the user experience, many consumers might claim that performance is more important than battery life for them specifically.
Apple is still paying fines and settlements its 2017 throttling decision, and that was about very old devices. OnePlus should have been more open about what the April 2021 patch would incur, at least giving users a choice. For now, the smartphone maker hasn’t clarified whether they're planning to bring back performance to normal levels on the next update or if things will be kept as they are. However, the move was a fiasco, and many owners of the OnePlus 9 are already complaining on social media.