OnePlus had announced its flagship OnePlus 12 smartphone globally at the ‘Smooth Beyond Belief’ event in New Delhi on January 23, just about a month after the device was launched in the company’s domestic market of China. Coming on the heels of the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series, the OnePlus 12 was predictably compared to the Korean smartphone maker’s flagship devices.
The OnePlus 12 comes with a lot of top-notch specs that put it on par with the Galaxy S24, including the addition of the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC and a triple rear camera setup with Hasselblad branding. However, many users were puzzled by the Chinese smartphone maker’s decision to stick to its update policy of supporting the flagship device with 4 years of OS updates and 5 years of security patches, unlike the recent 7-year OS support policy adopted by the Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S24 series. The OnePlus 12 comes with Android 14 out of the box, and the 4 years of OS updates means that the smartphone is expected to be updated until at least Android 18.
Now, OnePlus President and COO Kinder Liu has explained in an interaction with Tom’s Guide why the company chose to stick with a policy of sticking with 4 years of OS upgrades.
Liu noted that extended software updates may not be very useful if the hardware of these devices can’t last that long. He said, “Simply offering longer software update policies completely misses the point…It’s not just software update policies that are important to the user, it’s the fluency of your phone’s user experience too.”
“When our competitors say their software policy will last seven years, remember that their phone’s battery may not,” the top executive added.
Using an analogy of smartphone as a sandwich, Liu said, “Imagine your phone is a sandwich. Some manufacturers are now saying that the filling in their sandwich — their phone’s software — will still be good to eat in seven years’ time. But what they’re not telling you is that the bread in the sandwich — the user experience — might be moldy after four years. Suddenly a seven-year software update policy doesn’t matter, because the rest of your experience with the phone is terrible.”
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Published: 07 Feb 2024, 11:46 AM IST