Last year, OnePlus officially merged with OPPO. With the merger, it became an independent sub-brand of the latter. The two companies also integrated the codebase of their operating systems based on Android. They even made an announcement regarding the arrival of a unified OS in the second half of 2022. But now, months later, the plans have changed. There will be no common software after all.
In an official announcement post on OnePlus Community, the brand’s CEO Pete Lau confirms that OxygenOS and ColorOS will remain independent brand properties. This decision is based on feedback from the community.
However, it will not change the fact that both these Android skins will continue to use the unified codebase. In other words, OxygenOS will live on as a layer or skin atop ColorOS for better or worse.
In the past few months, we witnessed the migration of features across the two software. We believe the same will prevail in the future as well.
The primary reason for utilizing a unified codebase is to deliver updates faster. But so far, it hasn’t come into fruition. As of now, Android 12 stable is only available for the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 Pro.
Perhaps, it will get better with the release of OxygenOS 13 later this year. Though OnePlus hasn’t revealed it, the next iteration of OxygenOS will likely be based on Android 13.
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