OnePlus deliberately slows down OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro in Chrome, Twitter, Facebook and other apps
Anandtech investigated and found that OnePlus is slowing down its OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro flagships in 300 popular apps.
What we know
Experts noticed that Google Chrome, Uber, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook and even some proprietary programs of the company, when opened, do not use the productive core of the Snapdragon 888 processor - Cortex-X1. It seemed to them that some algorithm was blocking the work of applications. This was indicated by the poor results of the JetStream 2 and Speedometer 2.0 benchmarks. The numbers were on par with smartphones 11 years ago.
To test their theory, Anandtech programmers created copies of popular programs and ran the test again. The results were opposite. Two days after the publication of the study, OnePlus confirmed that and explained what was the matter:
“Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. 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. While this may impact the devices’ performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus as always is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users."
Whether OnePlus is planning to do something with the algorithm is unknown.