I'd love to believe that, but I'm a OnePlus owner who bought in with the "promise" of major OS updates for 2 years, and security for 3. My device (a 6T) crossed the 2 year mark in November, with no sign of Android 11 in sight. Between the M1 mac & android getting progressively worse, I've never been closer to abandoning Linux & Android. EDIT: Android 11
Likes it
Absolutely love this project for keeping my OnePlus 6T alive. Such sad state of affairs for Android. They dropped the ball on making any working edge deep learning inference framework. iOS is way better at this of all things. For being an OSS platform the amount of rigidity in not letting users customize to the fullest without rooting is just tragic.
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I'm still running this on my OnePlus 6T, purchased refurbished from ebay for $60. Runs fine. Using it degoogled, I'm not sure if e/OS or similar alternatives have any advantage. It can run PostmarketOS as well which I might play with at some point. The 6t allows bootloader locking if I sign it with my own keys, but I haven't tried that yet. A shame it is less supported on newer devices, but these older devices meet my needs perfectly anyway, so I'm not too worried. People buying a new $800 phone every year are just wasting their disposable income IMO.
Likes it
The new(er) mid range chipsets indeed are so so nice now. Pretty/fully modern process nodes, battery efficient, still very respectable cores. Really glad to see we've finally landed at a place where finding an old refurbished flagship is not the only logical choice, where the mid-range has a lot going on for it. Just wish we had some mainline kernel support, could put Debian on these things! I've had a OnePlus 6T (2018) that supposedly does pretty ok that I've been meaning to try Mobian on, and it felt like for a bit Snapdragons were getting better and better Linux support. But that motion seems to have really tapered off in the last ~2 years?
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I just replace a OnePlus6T from 2018 with a brand new Pixel 8 and I regret it. The 6T had the latest LineageOS and the P8 has GrapheneOS. Both have the latest Android but there's nothing on the Pixel that's better than the OnePlus. 6 years and no noticeable differences in terms of battery, performance, screen, ergonomy, etc. I should have stuck with the old one but I was convinced things were still progressing. My bad.
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OnePlus 6T with Android 14 is still working like a charm, this even beat out Nothing Phone 1 in getting the latest Android update
Likes it
I've been using OnePlus for 5 years (two different phones, recently switched 6T to Nord2). Never had any problems with stability, fingerprint scanner is stellar, and there are multiple apps for... Basically whatever. Just pick your favorite flavor. And they have 1 feature that kills the iPhone for me. They are not tied to obsolescence. Once OnePlus drops support, I can install DivestOS or LineageOS and the phone keeps working and being up-to-date. I installed DivestOS on my old 6T and it became my backup phone (normally I take it with me when I go hiking or to the beach, just to not have my main device with me in case there's an unfortunate accident). Apple has a tendency to turn old devices into paperweight after a few years.
Likes it
before becoming a psychotherapist I was a vehicle tech at Jaguar cars for 20 years. I therefore view all cars as modern day horses and anyone who pays a small fortune for a car must be absolutely stupid, blind to the impact of market forces, the effects of advertising and a general lack of personal awareness around socialized narcissism. The same for phones. I have never bought a new phone. For years I have only bought second hand android phones a few years old. I recently bought a Oneplus 6T for £100 and installed lineage 19.1 with Android 12. running perfectly. Who would want for anymore than that? Paying $1500 for a phone which is the equivalent to a months wages for those on minimum wage is obscene to me.
Doesn’t like it
The closest (proper) android equivalent to me is the Pixel 4a (at 144mm height). Unfortunately the 5a and (leaked specs) of the 6a are both gigantic and is unfortunate to me. It does a lot of things right: is a (relatively) smol phone, has proper software updates/support, has a headphone jack, allows for bootloader unlocking, support eSIM, has usb3, has a large development community for custom roms/after-market support, and has proper noise cancellation for calls (many other OEMs don't have proper noise cancellation leading to echos all the time) The other contenders are all either larger (but better hardware value), had worse software support, or had a combination of the previous. I will however give a nod to OnePlus for allowing QFIL flashing and having those files available for when devices are soft-bricked/stuck in EDL mode so you can always rescue them. However, their software leaves a lot to be desired in both long term software updates (older models are often not given timely updates), and in refinement (ex. my OnePlus 6T constantly echos on phone calls). A note if you're going to go Pixel line: if you ever decide to root, MAKE SURE you flash the correct model's files. I've seen several times online and had a friend flash the wrong model and end up perma-bricking their phones. Google does /not/ release the QFIL/firehose files for their phones (unlike OnePlus, Xiaomi) so if you make this mistake you WILL have to send it back for a motherboard replacement. If you don't h
Likes it
Interesting - I recently got myself an S9 and my wife a OnePlus 6T, and the OnePlus gets much better battery life (with fewer apps and overall lighter usage) - but now I'm not so impressed if that's how it's achieved. It's a fairly divisive issue - I can understand developers getting frustrated if their app's functionality is broken, but I do think this should be more in the user's control. A permissions-based model for backgrounding would be better, but there's too much permission prompting as well on Android (and this is something you can't back up - so on any restore, you're left 'allowing' permissions in every app you use in a new way - yes, when I select the camera mode in an app, I want to allow use of the camera - gets tedious across a bunch of different apps). My S9 (or maybe it's just Android) also puts a notification up if an app continues to run when I click 'back' out of it (or some other heuristic - it's not for every app, but it does a good job of identifying which are running) - which I think is a better compromise. It makes it much more visible which apps are consuming resources, and tapping the notification takes me to the App Info page with the 'Force Stop' button at the top. It's a bit noisy (it appears even for the stock music player, where obviously I want that to continue running), but it serves well as forcing visibility of battery hogs (whether it's through incompetence or nefarious background data collection), and reassuring to see it there for the
Doesn’t like 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.