OnePlus officially ends software support for OnePlus 6/6T series

Damien Wilde | Jan 17 2022 - 2:15 am PT

Three years after officially launching with Android Oreo pre-installed, software support for the OnePlus 6 and 6T series has officially ended.

For hardware holdouts, the OnePlus 6 and 6T series are highly regarded in the fan community offering much of what made the “Never Settle” brand a mainstay within the enthusiast fanbase. The device duo was released within six months of one another in 2018 and touted much of the same core hardware. This included the core Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset and between 6 and 12GB of RAM, which has stood the OnePlus 6 and 6T in good stead since launch.

The OnePlus 6 came with Android Oreo pre-installed, while later in the year the OnePlus 6T upped the software version to Android 9 Pie. As part of OnePlus’ software three-year software update commitment, the duo was officially updated to Android 11 and OxygenOS 11.

A muted announcement was made on the OnePlus Forums within an existing thread to confirm that, yes, official software support for the OnePlus 6 and 6T will no longer continue (h/t CachysBlog). This confirmation is no shock, but a surprise recent update leaves the OnePlus 6 and 6T running OxygenOS 11.1.2.2 as the final software build. Luckily, this does contain the December 2021 security patch, but, alas, the divisive 12 and OxygenOS 12 OTA will not be made available.

Hi friends,

After 3 major updates and more than 3 years of updates, around 60 Closed Beta builds and over 30 Open Beta builds it’s now time to close a chapter and announce the end of OnePlus 6 and 6T official software support.

It was thanks to your constant support that we were able to constantly improve the software experience on these devices and we can’t thank you enough for your constant feedback. We would like to share a special word of appreciation to all the beta testers, that, since 2018, have been testing features before they would get released to the stable version. You played a huge role in optimizing OxygenOS to ensure an overall better experience.

Once again, we’d like to extend our sincere gratitude to all of you for the tremendous support along the way. None of this would be possible without you. We’ll continue to listen to your voice to build even better products in the future.

Never Settle.

From here on out, if you are intent on using the OnePlus 6 or 6T throughout 2022 and beyond, you’ll need to contend with potential security flaws or consider going down third-party software channels. Luckily there are a number of third-party ROMs available for the OnePlus 6 and 6T that might help plug a software support gap if you do intend to hold on to your smartphone. We’d highly recommend LineageOS as a great place to start.