OnePlus has confirmed that it intentionally throttles its smartphone performance in “many of the most popular apps.” The company stated that this is done to improve battery life on the newly launched flagship OnePlus 9 series.
The news arrives after a series of tests from Anandtech‘s Andrei Frumusanu. After discovering this issue, he called it “rather baffling” that the latest flagship handsets saw a slowdown in a wide range of prominent applications from the Google Play Store. The tests came to the conclusion that the company is “blacklisting popular applications away from its fastest cores, causing slowdown in typical workloads such as web browsing.”
The test included applications like Google Chrome and Twitter among other popular apps and found that the slowed performance “applies to pretty much everything that has any level of popularity in the Play Store.” This intentional throttling has apparently affected all Google apps, all Microsoft Office apps, and all notable social media apps and web browsers, although, certain demanding mobile game titles like Genshin Impact remain unaffected by this slowdown. Recently, the OnePlus 9 Pro was also removed from Geekbench, a popular benchmarking platform, over claims of performance throttling.
As of right now, the brand confirmed this throttling issue and stated that “Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we could improve the devices’ battery life and heat management. As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize the devices’ performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app’s processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption.”
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