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Phones · OnePlus

OnePlus 6

17owners with an opinion
71%of verdicts positive
10/4positive/negative since 2024
3 yrslongest happy owner
1happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and reliability; criticized for display.

What owners wrote

Likes itOwned 3 years
> My impression is Google's are still the most updated OnePlus phones are/were also quite good (at least when I bought my OnePlus 6, I have heard it went… downhill from there). But I did two years of updates, plus one more through LineageOS. And I'll probably update again when LineageOS has their Android 12 release. OnePlus phones are good because they are (still) easily bootloader-unlockable, and are thus good (excellent) for custom ROMs. They do update fairly often on stock, but I think the stock ROM is getting worse and worse. Still, they're up there.
Doesn’t like itOwned 1.5 years
I was forced to give up my beloved OnePlus 6 barely eighteen months after buying it when AT&T shut down 3G and moved to a whitelist scheme where any phone not allowed was forbidden. I'd just moved my family off Verizon for the same reason, too. Wireless "progress" has been anything but. The 3G shutdown created dead zones where before I had adequate data connectivity. Even today I keep the 5G functionality of my phone turned off because 4G gives a consistently more reliable connection and faster data rates.
Likes it
I bought a OnePlus 6 for 50 euros from eBay and I can do a ton of things with it already. Plasma is great in mobile, and what did not work I got working pretty fast together with Kimi and DeepSeek. For example here's patches to get NFC YubiKey working in Secrets app: https://github.com/pimeys/oneplus6-yubikey-nfc It is a work in progress but pretty easy to pick things up and fix in this age of agents...
Neutral
Crazy timing. I did the same thing last week! I have an old oneplus 6 and all I did was plug it into my computer and told Claude what I want and it just worked. I even told it to make sure the battery doesn’t charge above 80% to not fry the battery and it couldn’t find the setting so wrote something to make it work. I feel like this whole thing would have taken a weekend pre AI - instead I did it on a whim and spent about 5 minutes on it and it took less than 2 hours of wall clock time.
Doesn’t like it
I can confirm this holding OP6 (enchilada) in my hands — it's a flagship postmarketOS device. It also has other nerd options available — Sailfish and Windows (Renegade Project) — but obviously with poor hardware support. I highly recommend keeping an eye on postmarketOS blog. [1] It's a fun reading, and development's been really rapid lately. What stopped me from full migration to pmOS the last time I tried it about a year ago was poor support of Magisk and Xposed in Waydroid, two things I can't imagine using Android apps without. But! With some tricks you can get pmOS dualboot on OP6. [2] Haven't tried it, but looks amazing. I think with the current direction and velocity, pmOS is going to get really close to Android in usability on supported hardware in the next couple of years. Except for power saving parity that never gonna happen. [1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/ [2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchil...
Likes it
I will say updating without worries (ie. it has rollbacks and image-based updates) has made it much more daily-drivable for me on a Oneplus 6 than other distributions, despite being so new. It's fun that image-based OSs - which were arguably popularlized by phones - are now coming back to phones on the Linux side too.
Likes it
This is absolutely cracked. I've been with OnePlus since the One, also getting the 2, 6 and now I have the 12. Stuck with them all these years because I really respected their - original - take on device freedom. I really should've seen the writing on the wall given how much pain it is to update it in the first place, as I have the NA version which only officially allows carrier updates, and I don't live in NA (and even if I did I'd still not be tied to a carrier). Now I have to consider my device dead re updates, because if I haven't already gotten the killing update I'd rather avoid it. First thing I did was unlock the bootloader, and I intend to root/flash it at some point. Will be finding another brand whenever I'm ready to upgrade again.
Likes it
> How is it having a Linux phone? Do you use it as your main Phone? Yes, I use it as my main phone. I like it, it reminds me a lot of the early Android days when I felt like I had complete control of the device, and I can customize it how I want to. If you want to tinker with it, I recommend a Oneplus 6/6T. They are sub $100 and its very well supported (that's what I am now using as my daily phone, with Mobian installed). I used to use a Librem 5, but it's battery life isn't great. The Oneplus 6 has no problem with a whole day's battery life with medium usage. > How well do android apps work? what about banking apps? I don't know, I tend not to use Android apps. Waydroid exists if you want to use them, and I have done that in the past. > any issues that would make u NOT recommend it to other people? Many of the devices have their own paper cuts to get it to work, and each model has their own quirks. For the Oneplus 6, calls have an audio problem with VoLTE that isn't fixed. > Are there many apps that are made for linux phones (or have a UI that works good with phones) so that you are not missing anything? For my use cases, it works. That includes SMS/MMS, voicemails, calls (sometimes, but I don't get many calls), email, car/bicycle/walking navigation, Signal, internet (Firefox), Matrix. Others have different use cases, so YMMV.
Likes it
I think that replacing your software after it stops getting security and feature updates and loses compatibility with apps extends the longevity of your phone's life and creates less e-waste. I used my old OnePlus 6 for longer than I would have if the software couldn't have been replaced because I could install a custom ROM on it.
Neutral
heya, author of the blog post here. the op6 happens to work but it's limited to debugging in el1, if you do manage to trap in el2 all the registers read 0 the reason this works at all on this production device is because oneplus screwed up and shipped a "debug profile" in production. this is a vendor signed elf (flashed to the dpdb partition or something like that) containing configuration to enable certain debugging features. the one we already know about is crashdump mode, the op6 will crashdump when you trigger an XPU violation or some kinds of bus abort, then you can dump the entire RAM and you dont even need to authenticate (no firehose just run bkerlers edl.py) this has come in handy for mainline development a few times heh but it seems that this profile also enables EUD which is super nice, that said i didnt manage to get breakpoints working at all yet....
Likes it
Do you keep a factory image for your OnePlus 9 pro in case you want to restore it? If so, how do you go about doing that? After OnePlus decided to stop publishing factory images, I decided to stop buying their phones. It's a real shame, because they really do make some great stuff and prices are quite reasonable generally speaking. I used to buy a new OnePlus phone nearly every year. The OnePlus 6 was one of my favorite phones of all time.
Neutral
My OnePlus 6 running Kupfer (Arch Linux ARM) [0] and my Shift6mq running Mobian [1] (Debian blend) in dual boot from microSDXC card [2] would like to have a word. Droidian (Halium-based Debian) also supports the enchilada.[3] And then, there's also NixOS mobile [4]. They all have had systemd before this. [0] https://kupfer.gitlab.io/ , setting up kupferbootstrap can be hard though, especially if you don't have docker set up on that system already. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/OnePlus/OnePlus6 To be frank though, I failed at installing Mobian on sdm845 hardware earlier myself, too. [2] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/SHIFT/SHIFT6mq#In... [3] https://devices.droidian.org/#/devices/enchilada [4] https://mobile.nixos.org/devices/oneplus-enchilada.html
Likes itHasn’t owned it
> Then they flushed nearly all of it down the toilet. The day they stopped posting factory images was the day I saw the writing on the wall. For me, it was when the killed the headphone jack with the OnePlus 6T. Around the time OP6 was released, the then CEO Carl Pei posted a poll around the headphone jack - a overwhelming majority of users said they used/wanted the jack - something like 80%+). Then they go ahead and release the 6T (and subsequent models) with no jack. At this point most of the OG fans (including myself) felt incredibly betrayed and vowed to never buy another OnePlus again. And soon, Carl Pei himself left the company and it's been downhill ever since. The OP6 was their last good phone which actually lived up to their "flagship killer" premise without compromising on features.
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
I follow the ecosystem for two projects [0], and the app ecosystem keeps getting better. Also, there's always Waydroid (LineageOS equivalent of Android 13 in a Container) and Android Translation Layer [1]. The best way to experience #LinuxMobile is IMHO on former Android Devices like the OnePlus 6 or Pixel 3a, as these are well designed devices with SoCs intended for phones. While having native hardware would be great, it's really hard to produce relatively bug-free hardware from scratch. With mainline, the SoC is always going to be older, and small-scale production leads to high prices. The economics just don't work out for non-enthusiasts who then ideally are also up for paying a software support subscription. Also, as a manufacturer you'll want to somewhat control the experience, leading to 'yet another small scale device-specific distribution, which has it's downsides. Across devices audio issues are unfortunately still somewhat common, in part caused by the Pipewire transition (things that had been figured out for PulseAudio need to be figured out again). But it's on people's radar, and funds are invested to solve this [2]. VoLTE is another challenge, as it allows to carriers to become more gatekeepy with their stupid device support lists - of course there are workarounds like using a SIP account, but that's too inconvenient for many. Also, RCS support is not yet there, but as long as SMS/MMS fallbacks are still around, this not a dealbreaker. [0]: https://linmob.net ,…