September 20, 2021. Pete Lau has published a post today announcing “OnePlus 2.0” and the unification of OxygenOS and ColorOS into a single operating system. The framing is explicitly positive: combining OxygenOS’s speed and cleanliness with ColorOS’s stability and features will produce a better OS than either alone. The timeline is concrete: the unified OS ships first on the 2022 flagship, then rolls out across the portfolio.
I am going to say what the community is saying in the forums and the subreddit today: this is the announcement that OxygenOS as an independent product is ending. The unified OS is ColorOS with an OxygenOS skin, built on ColorOS’s architecture, maintained by an engineering organization reporting through OPPO’s product chain. The name “OxygenOS” will continue. The product it describes will not be the product the community has valued for six years.
The community backlash and why it may not change anything
The forums are loud today. The subreddit is predictably furious. Multiple tech publications are framing the community reaction as significant enough to potentially influence the decision. I am less optimistic than that framing suggests, and here is why: the decision being made is not an OxygenOS product decision. It is a BBK/OPPO resource allocation decision made at a level of the organization that is not accountable to the OnePlus community. Pete Lau is now the OPPO CPO. The OxygenOS team reports through OPPO’s engineering organization. The community is lobbying a representative who may not have the authority to grant what they are asking for.
Community feedback changed product decisions in the OnePlus 3 era because there was an independent OnePlus decision-making authority that the community could influence. If that authority has been absorbed into OPPO’s organization, community feedback on OnePlus software has to travel up through OPPO’s management chain to be acted upon. OPPO has its own community, its own priorities, and its own software team. I am skeptical that the OnePlus community’s voice carries the same weight at that level of the organization that it carried when it could reach Carl Pei directly in the forums.
OnePlus 2.0 is live. The 2022 flagship will ship with the unified OS. We will evaluate it when it arrives. But I want to be on record today, September 20, 2021, saying that the community’s concerns about what this means for OxygenOS are correct, and that the organizational changes that have happened since June make it structurally difficult for those concerns to produce a different outcome.
Part of OnePlus: The Complete Story, my full history of OnePlus from founding to the Realme merger.