Minus World

With all the panicked chatter about the OnePlus brand over the last couple of days, I have a useful anecdote to add.

And it involved a recent trip to the very T-Mobile store I first got acquainted with the OnePlus brand, which has largely treated me pretty well.

But on that day, I briefly pondered if I would be happier on a carrier plan after buying my last OnePlus phone outright. I was dismayed by my options, none of which had anything close to my OnePlus 11’s killer feature: 80-watt fast charging.

It shouldn’t have been this way. After all, I found out about these phones by going into this specific T-Mobile store about eight years ago, when the iPhones started to feel overly expensive and less flexible. Looking at my options, I wandered to the other side of the store, and there it was: The OnePlus 6t, a genuinely good phone for about half the price, minus the iPhone’s ugly forehead.

That was my introduction to Android, and it was a lasting one; I am currently on my fifth OnePlus phone, after a brief diversion to Samsung-land that honestly couldn't have ended soon enough.

But when I walked in the store last month, I realized the sales staff didn’t have any idea what OnePlus was when I said I wished they still sold them. Instead, the salesperson acted like I was crazy talking about this brand.

I wasn’t. They used to sell this brand, with its fast charging and unique features catching the eye. (For my money, the pop-up selfie camera, a highlight of the OnePlus 7, was the best feature a mainstream phone ever had.)

The manager knew what this brand was, but he told his employee that OnePlus had gone out of business. I had to correct him.

About two weeks later, I bought another OnePlus phone the inconvenient way—off of Amazon. It may be my favorite OnePlus phone ever. And yet, it may be my last, and not by choice.

Earlier this week, a story emerged from an Android blog that suggested OnePlus may be at risk of going away entirely. The Android Headlines story, with the brutal headline “OnePlus is Being Dismantled,” was not based on anything firm. No informants in factories like the Apple rumor hound Ming-Chi Kuo, or solid sourcing, along the lines of Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. It was more hunch-based.

The piece was packed with numerous words hinting that the company had contracted significantly, canceled some product launches, and was failing even in its strongholds. It was not an airtight piece, and people quickly picked up on the odd wording scattered throughout, leading to this message from site founder Chris Yackulic:

As the site owner, I made the decision to use AI assistance in structuring this article. Everything else is human work, including the entire investigation, reporting from independent sources, current & former employees, Chinese business publications research, and four analyst firms.

If you have something as shocking as “a popular smartphone brand is going under,” no matter the quality of the sourcing, you don’t hand the football to the bots. That’s a piece you write yourself.

Truth vs. slop

As you might imagine, OnePlus was quick to refute this commentary, with OnePlus India’s CEO, Robin Liu, urging interested parties to “verify information from official sources before sharing unsubstantiated claims.”

But the truth is that there do appear to be some challenges facing the company.

A mere two years after OnePlus disappeared from T-Mobile stores, employees that I personally spoke to did not even know that the company still was a going concern. That is a significant branding problem that appears to be of OnePlus’ own making. The company’s Nord line of phones was doing very well at the lower end of the U.S. market thanks to the T-Mobile deal. But clearly, something was off. The OnePlus 11, a pretty good phone, was kept away from the same markets where the Nord line was thriving.

“We’re also looking forward to bringing more exciting products to the market through T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile in the future,” the company’s Spencer Blank told CNET at the time.

Three years later, it’s as if OnePlus was never there. They’re now a rarity in North American brick-and-mortar retail. Based on a quick check, the only major carrier that still offers a OnePlus phone on a carrier plan is Verizon, which sells the low-end OnePlus Nord 30 5G, a three-year-old device. You can find their phones in Best Buy, but there are way more carrier stores than Best Buys.

And it’s not a problem unique to the U.S.—retailers in India have complained of their challenges keeping OnePlus devices in stock, despite a gray market that seems flooded with the devices.

All of this, plus a couple of other things, has made buying new OnePlus devices frustrating in recent years. The OnePlus 13, when it first came out, did not appear on Amazon for months, meaning that anyone who wanted this phone had to buy it directly from the manufacturer, losing out on easy subsidies and credit plans. (To their credit, it did eventually appear, and the OnePlus 15 did start selling on Amazon within about a month of its release.)

There’s exclusivity, and then there’s leaving customers out in the cold.

Is the fanbase thinning out? Let’s hope not

Oxygen Updater, a community of OnePlus enthusiasts that makes a third-party software installer for the phones, suggested that the energy was slowly dissipating from their community, something they would obviously have a front row seat to:

In fact, even we, at Oxygen Updater, felt the decline of OnePlus first-hand. Many years ago, despite having far fewer users, we received many more emails and messages on our own Discord server. Everyone was active and involved, and most of all, passionate. Even the quality of emails/messages has reduced over the years. It wasn’t uncommon to have a mini-conversation with someone new on a regular basis: they had suggestions for us, and we had help for them. There were even purchase advice discussions happening on the regular, with a steady flow of newcomers who were happy to be there.

Fast forward a few years, and that’s nowhere to be found; at least, not the same frequency. There are still some active members of our community, but where’s everyone else gone? If the old guards have left, where are the new replacements? I, along with long-time team member Anonymoussaurus, once considered writing an article solely to deal with this issue: to ask you all why the quality and the quantity of interactions between us and our users reduced. But we never got around to it, because we both thought that it would be a temporary thing, and that it would fix itself.

The phones themselves seem to suggest a retreat of sorts. When I got my OnePlus phone, I opted for the 13 because it was the same design language that I had been using since the 6t, but it was clearly the most polished version of that. It was one of the best-reviewed OnePlus phones ever. The OnePlus 15, on the other hand, seemed to bet the farm on high refresh rate and battery life over everything else—and leaned into the boxy look of recent iPhones and Samsung devices. It felt like a downgrade from genuine greatness. (Speaking of downgrades, the cameras on the OnePlus 15 are significantly worse than those on the OnePlus 13. No clue what they were thinking there.)

I’m not the only person to notice this. At Android Authority, Robert Triggs seemed surprised that OnePlus took such a step back:

The OnePlus 13 was exactly what many of us envision the ideal OnePlus phone to be, even with the odd compromise or two. On the other hand, its successor is so stuffed with side-grades and trade-offs that it’s hard to believe it came from the same company just a few months later.

All of this is to say that, even if the Android Headlines report is wrong, OnePlus has a very serious brand problem which may or may not be a byproduct of its complex corporate leadership. As one of many subsidiaries of BBK Electronics, it is in the unenviable position of constantly having to compete with its corporate siblings for attention and resources. Fellow BBK brand Oppo, a major player in China, seems to get most of the attention there, which ultimately bleeds into less exciting OnePlus products in outside markets. It feels nonsensical, and it ultimately harms the products that reach consumers.

If I was OnePlus and I wanted to actually compete outside of China, I would immediately bring back the carrier deals. They may be costly, but to have a chance in the U.S. market, you simply have to play ball. At a time when three companies seem to utterly dominate the sector—Apple, Google, and Samsung—we need more competitors, not fewer.

It would be nice if one of those companies was OnePlus.