March 21, 2022. OxygenOS 12 has launched with the OnePlus 10 Pro, and I will not waste your time building to the verdict: XDA Developers opened their review with “OxygenOS 12 is a disaster.” That is not hyperbole. The clean, minimal interface that has defined OxygenOS since 2015 has been replaced by something that looks, behaves, and feels like ColorOS. The clean notification system has been modified in ways that most reviewers evaluate as worse than what it replaced. The settings structure has been reorganized in a way that buries options the community has always found easily. The animations are slower on the same hardware than OxygenOS 11 was. The system feels heavier.
I said in September that the community’s concerns were correct. I am not satisfied to have been right about this.
The specific things that are broken
Reviewers and community members have documented: system animations are slower than OxygenOS 11 on the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 hardware. The always-on display implementation is draining battery faster than the equivalent OxygenOS 11 feature. The Shelf feature, a contextual panel that the OxygenOS community considered one of the best implementations of Google Now-style contextual data anywhere in Android, has been redesigned in a way that most community members prefer less. App cloning now requires additional setup steps through a “Parallel Space” implementation that feels retrofitted. In some regional builds, promotional content has appeared in places it should not exist.
Each of these changes is individually explicable as the product of different engineering priorities. The cumulative effect is that OxygenOS 12 is a worse product for OxygenOS users than OxygenOS 11 was. A major OS version update producing a worse product than the version it replaces is not a normal outcome. The downgrade guides circulating within 48 hours of the stable release are the community’s real verdict: people are going backwards voluntarily, which is the strongest possible statement that the product has moved in the wrong direction.
OnePlus is saying it is listening to feedback and will address the community’s concerns. I am watching to see what that means in practice. What I know today is that the community members who defended OnePlus against critics who said the OPPO integration would damage OxygenOS now have to acknowledge that the critics were right. That is a significant trust breach, and trust that has been breached once is harder to rebuild than trust that was simply insufficient in the first place.
Part of OnePlus: The Complete Story, my full history of OnePlus from founding to the Realme merger.