OnePlus 6/6T won’t get Android 11 until long after Android 12’s release

Ben Schoon | Apr 29 2021 - 6:34 am PT

If you’re still rocking the 2018-released OnePlus 6 or OnePlus 6T, hopefully you aren’t too excited about the Android 11 release. OnePlus has just confirmed we won’t see its release anytime soon.

In a post today, OnePlus confirmed that the OxygenOS 11 Open Beta program for the OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T won’t be opened up until August of this year. Yes, nearly a year after Android 11 first rolled out to Pixels, and that’s just for a beta for the OnePlus 6-series. That means that, if all goes well, it’ll be a few more months for a stable update.

Of course, it wasn’t exactly promised that OnePlus would bring this update to its 2018 flagships. As Android Police pointed out, the OnePlus 6 already saw two updates to Android 9 and Android 10, but the OnePlus 6T launched on Android 9, meaning this would only be the second major update for the device. In any case, three updates aren’t out of the ordinary for OnePlus even though they aren’t promised, but this one is arriving extremely late by any measurement. At this point, it seems most likely that Android 11 will arrive on these devices around the same time Android 12 rolls out to the OnePlus 9 series.

The Android 11 Open Beta version for the OnePlus 6 & 6T is scheduled to be released at the end of August, please stay tuned for our Community posts for more details.

It doesn’t really take much to see the pattern at play here. OnePlus was once among the best when it comes to Android updates, but that’s degraded over the past few years. Just look at the state of Android 11 updates on the rest of the company’s portfolio. OnePlus was mostly silent about this particular update in general for months, and now that they’ve finally spoken out, it’s not good news. At least you can install it on your own.

Meanwhile, there’s Samsung, and who thought we’d ever be saying that?