June 15, 2021. Pete Lau has just announced that he is taking on the role of Chief Product Officer at OPPO while retaining his position as CEO of OnePlus. The announcement simultaneously confirms that OnePlus will pursue “further integration” with OPPO across product development and software. The phrasing is careful. No merger is announced. No acquisition is described. “Integration” is doing a great deal of work in this press release.
The community response in the forums today is divided along predictable lines. One camp is arguing, correctly, that the integration is inevitable given the OPPO ownership structure and that making it official at least ends the fiction of independence. The other camp is arguing, also correctly, that whatever fiction of independence existed was the only structural protection preventing OnePlus’s product decisions from being subordinated to OPPO’s priorities. Both camps are right. The question is whether making the integration explicit is better or worse than the previous arrangement, and I think the answer depends entirely on whether the integration preserves anything that has made OnePlus worth the community’s loyalty for eight years.
What “further integration” means in practice
The R&D teams building OxygenOS are being folded into OPPO’s larger engineering organization. Supply chain decisions will now be made with the full OPPO portfolio’s efficiency as the primary variable rather than OnePlus’s community priorities as a constraint. Marketing teams will need to restructure. The people who built OxygenOS into one of the best Android experiences available, who understood what the OnePlus community valued and why, will now be contributing expertise to a larger organization with different priorities and a different primary audience in mind.
I am watching this carefully because I have been following OnePlus since the One, and the community relationship I have seen the OxygenOS team maintain through bugs, updates, and feature requests over the past eight years is not something that survives reorganization automatically. It survives because specific people, in specific roles, with specific authority to respond to community feedback and act on it, do the ongoing work of maintaining it. If those people are now in a larger organization reporting through OPPO’s management chain, the community relationship they maintained becomes dependent on OPPO’s organizational priorities, not OnePlus’s. That is a different and more fragile thing. I hope I am wrong about where this leads. Today I am not confident I am.
Part of OnePlus: The Complete Story, my full history of OnePlus from founding to the Realme merger.