What went wrong with OnePlus? [Video]

From a darling of the early Android era to a husk on the brink of becoming completely irrelevant, just what went wrong for OnePlus?

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Enthusiast beginnings end in tears

I don’t need to tell you that way back in the day, a brand like OnePlus truly felt like a breath of fresh air. A brand that offered the best hardware, clean software, and a community that was the backbone of all of it.

The innovative invite system built hype; it added intrigue. It created a cool club that only the most “in the know” people were part of. You – the buyer – were chosen, and that was unlike anything we’d seen from a smartphone maker before. The most vocal enthusiast fans helped build the brand from basically zero – although this image was cleverly cultivated given that OnePlus was originally backed by Chinese conglomerate BBK from its inception.

I think this has created a bit of a strange situation, as while it’s great to have this grassroots style following, it doesn’t always translate to major market share shifts. Instead, with such a small, vocal group of fans, you can run into problems with scaling without alienating your existing customer base.

Not to diminish the enthusiast space, it is very small compared to the undoubted riches of the “average buyer,” and that is where maybe OnePlus made mistakes in the early phases that effectively prepped for an inevitable downfall. A market disruptor needs to keep disrupting or risk having someone else steal the thunder.

That’s not to say the buyers are wrong. No, it was building a brand on the backs of the people who care most about the true intricacies of the devices that they are buying.

In recent years, the enthusiast market we once knew has diminished drastically. Fewer phones that offer the best of everything are not viable when aimed at a shrinking market sector. This problem has worsened as in the early days of Android, there were not as many people using smartphones. Now they are ubiquitous.

Struggling to break into the established order

One of the biggest issues that OnePlus has faced from the get-go has been breaking into the established pack of buyer options. The initial invite system created hype, but locked people off from just buying on a whim. It was an intentional purchase spurred on by initial interest, research, or maybe even word-of-mouth recommendations.

Global availability has been something the brand has struggled with. Carrier partnerships have been short-lived or non-existent for long periods.

If you want to break into the US market as a complete unknown, you still need direct cooperation with the major telecom carriers. T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T still account for over 90% of all sales through postpaid contracts and financing plans.

Yes, OnePlus had a brief foothold thanks to a partnership with T-Mobile, but without an endless marketing war chest and slow growth, that faded and ceased. The US market is, for all intents and purposes, a three-device market. Apple and Samsung duke it out for the premium segment, while Motorola and Google try to pick up the rest of the scraps.

OnePlus never even broke 1% market share across the entire planet, despite being a bit of an Android darling and arguably getting many more column inches than similar OEMs with a larger user base.

First mover advantage was lost

OnePlus had lightning in a bottle at the start of the smartphone era. Offering cheap, high-power phones that were different from the competition proved to be a masterstroke.

However, that first mover advantage was lost within just a few years. The idea of a “flagship killer” became almost redundant by virtue of other brands simply adopting a similar strategy.

Sales, no doubt, staggered and slowed as the growing smartphone space became littered with more competitors in the same price bracket. Brands like Xiaomi, and even inter-brand competition from Vivo, Realme, and parent company Oppo, stifled the impressive packages offered by OnePlus.

That’s great for us, the buyer, but not for OnePlus. A company that was still just a blip in the mobile space in terms of market share.

The era of Settling

The iconic “Never Settle” mantra was originally built on a razor-thin profit margin strategy: offering the absolute fastest silicon available, great displays, super-fast charging technology, and more at half the cost of an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S-series phone.

Maintaining this price disruption required aggressive cost-cutting in other key areas, such as using cheaper camera sensors, omitting wireless charging, and skipping expensive IP water-resistance certifications.

As OnePlus matured and attempted to capture mainstream buyers – while still ensuring long-time fans were sated – the company was forced to bridge these feature gaps, resulting in high-profile upgrades like their multi-million dollar Hasselblad imaging partnership.

Incorporating these tier-one components and introducing expensive brand partnerships inevitably forced retail prices upward from the historic $400-600 sweet spot into the $800 to $1,000 premium bracket. Once the price advantage vanished, OnePlus was forced to compete toe-to-toe with dominant giants without the decades of premium brand equity required to justify those extra costs.

By always trying to offer the best specs for the price, it costs dearly, as any deviation from that would be seen as a downgrade. Sometimes it would mean that certain elements were neglected, such as the camera hardware.

It hasn’t always been about the hardware either. A big problem has been the lack of optimization for new introductions. Cameras have been an area of contention for a long time. Things like this have held back undoubtedly impressive packages.

This is a twofold problem: you have the capability, but execution would be the stumbling block.

Founding fallout

While we can point to many things, one pivotal moment arguably stands out more than any other.

In the eyes of the fans, Carl Pei’s departure in 2020 could be seen as the catalyst for the downfall of OnePlus. Carl Pei left shortly after the launch of the OnePlus Nord in October 2020. This came just a few months after Pete Lau took a new role to oversee “brand synergy” between Oppo, OnePlus, and Realme.

By 2021, Oppo and OnePlus had fully merged, and Lau then assumed the role of Chief Product Officer of Oppo, while Pei founded another enthusiast phone company, Nothing.

This was a critical period for the company.

But from the OnePlus 8 series, the writing was on the wall as OxygenOS 12 became a fork of ColorOS, which led to better software update support, but we lost the “clean” aesthetic that the company launched and was known for. It was the primary anchor keeping tech-savvy buyers loyal to the brand, serving as a pristine, user-focused alternative to the heavily skinned, slower software options offered by competitors.

While ColorOS has since gone on to be a solid option. This transitional period has marred OnePlus devices. Yes, it streamlined BBK’s internal engineering pipeline and improved long-term update timelines, but it fundamentally stripped OnePlus of its defining OxygenOS experience. It didn’t help that it wasn’t a perfect transition either, as bugs and issues were rife right out of the gate.

Too many form factors

Whether driven by Oppo or something else entirely, OnePlus has suffered from offering too many options and too many form factors in a bid to try to capture more of the market.

We used to get one or two carefully crafted OnePlus phones per year, a mid-cycle “T” refresh, and that was enough.

The lineup has exploded into a confusing web of premium flagships, “Pro” models, “T” variations, and regional “R” variants, alongside a sprawling budget ecosystem including the Nord, Nord CE, and Nord N-series tablets and foldables.

Slapping a cheap, plastic $200-300 phone with a low-res display next to an $800 flagship completely diluted the premium prestige of the OnePlus badge, confusing everyday consumers and alienating loyal fans. Loyal fans that have even more options to choose from that do almost all of the same things – many without compromises.

Quiet quitting on a global scale

Ultimately, whether intentional or not, OnePlus has forgotten its audience. Each iteration has seen price creep, alienating the original audience, but going toe-to-toe with premium brands that didn’t compromise in any major area – save the Pixel series. For many, that might be a reason not to look at a OnePlus phone.

The community is being ignored, and every sign indicates that OnePlus has pulled the plug on operations outside of China in recent months. The company hasn’t confirmed anything publicly despite behind-the-scenes proof that things are not a rosy picture.

Sure, the company might choose radio silence, but that is deafening. This not only hurts customers, who until recently were buying the impressive OnePlus 15, but it also potentially hurts the parent company. How can someone trust Oppo to do right by customers if they can’t even be truthful about what is happening with a beloved brand? The answer is probably that you can’t.

The time of OnePlus looks to be over, and, while there were internal factors at play from the very get-go, in some ways, the company only has itself to blame.