It’s another controversy for OnePlus. This time, it happened to have played around with the performance of its current flagship phones, the OnePlus 9 and the 9 Pro. It was recently discovered that the company is slowing the popular apps’ performance on the 9 phones. Now, it has responded to the same.
OnePlus, in a statement to XDA Developers, has accepted that it indeed throttled the performance with an aim to increase the battery life of the phones. Here’s a look at the details.
OnePlus confirms throttling apps on its current flagships
Before we tell what OnePlus said after the throttling issue surfaced, here’s what really happened. A report by AnandTech suggested that the working of many popular apps (primarily web browsing through Google Chrome) was slowed down, which wasn’t the case with popular Geekbench apps or any other app.
This was discovered while testing the OnePlus 9 Pro when slower browser benchmark figures showed up, which was significantly decreased for a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chip seen on any other high-end phone available.
It was found that Chrome and many more apps were restricted from using the fast cores and ended up using the slower Cortex-A55 cores.
Following the report, Geekbench took action and delisted the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 Pro, calling this the manipulation of the benchmark.
Now, this has led OnePlus into responding to the whole throttling fiasco. The company agrees to the deed and suggests that it is done to sort the battery performance issues on the OnePlus 9 and the 9 Pro and deliver improved performance for the devices.
The statement reads, “Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we could improve the devices’ battery life and heat management. As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize the devices’ performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app’s processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption. While this may impact the devices’ performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus as always is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users.”
While OnePlus backs it up by saying it’s for the users, it doesn’t feel right for it to hinder a device’s performance without the users knowing.
This is not the first time this has happened, though. The company was found throttling with the OnePlus 3T and the OnePlus 5. Apple was one of the companies to do a similar thing to its older iPhones (iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus) via a software update.
