OnePlus 3/3T raise concern over touch latency issues, OnePlus giving Nougat priority for now [Update: Latency fix coming with Nougat]

There’s no doubt that the OnePlus 3 and recently announced OnePlus 3T are among the best bang-for-your-buck Android smartphones on the market today, but they aren’t without issues. As owners have noticed over the past few weeks, both devices have poor touch latency. Now, Carl Pei, one of the company’s founders, has responded to those complaints.

So first of all, what is touch latency? Touch latency is the delay between when you tap the touchscreen compared to when it reacts to that input. It’s a small but noticeable difference to the overall speed of using the phone. When measured, it was revealed that the OnePlus 3’s touch delay is about 93ms, almost double that of your average Android flagship which generally lands at 50ms.

Where would you notice this? The most likely scenario is when typing quickly or rapidly pressing buttons on the display. Thankfully, this isn’t a hardware issue, but rather an issue which can be fixed through a software update. Eventually.

As we’ve seen in the past, OnePlus isn’t always the fastest when it comes to pushing system updates — just look at the OnePlus X — but at least for the time being, the company is putting priority on pushing Android Nougat to the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T. OnePlus previously promised the update by the end of this year, and that deadline is quickly approaching. So, at least for now, OnePlus owners with touch latency issues are going to have to wait — ironic, no?

Update: OnePlus has reached out to confirm that a fix for touch latency will be coming with the Android Nougat update for the OnePlus 3/OnePlus 3T.

https://twitter.com/getpeid/status/803803066369646592