Oneplus becomes part of Oppo – with a new update strategy
The Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oneplus will be integrated into the BBK subsidiary Oppo. What sounds like a surprise isn’t really. The Oneplus brand will continue to exist, they say.
Oneplus, which launched its flagship killer with a lot of noise in 2012 and has since built up a small, strong community, will be integrated into Oppo. This announced Oneplus CEO Pete Lau in the company’s forum.
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Oneplus boss Lau has also been working for Oppo since summer 2020
Oneplus CEO Pete Lau, who originally started at Oppo and built the brand together with Carl Pei, announced in the Oneplus forumthat the company has reached “a turning point for the future”. Last year Oneplus began to expand its product portfolio – we remember the Oneplus Nord (test) and the other budget models N10 5G and N100 – in order to offer more options.
At around the same time, Lau had already taken on new responsibilities at Oppo as Senior Vice President (SVP) and Head of the Product Experience Team. Since then, the companies, which both – like Realme, by the way – belong to the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, BBK-Electronics, have merged some teams. The aim was to “streamline processes better and use additional common resources”.
According to Lau, merging the teams has had a positive impact. Now it has been decided to integrate Oneplus more deeply into Oppo. The company will have “more resources available to develop even better products”. Furthermore, you will also become more efficient, for example when it comes to providing faster and more stable software updates for Oneplus devices.
Lau emphasizes that the Oneplus brand will continue to exist and operate independently. This means that there will still be Oneplus products and separate events.
Now reading: Android 12: These smartphones should receive the big update
What does the integration of Oneplus in Oppo mean?
The fact that Oppo and Oneplus basically worked more or less closely together from the start was evident early on in the device design. So it was hardly surprising that the Oneplus 6 (test) looked quite similar to the Oppo R15 despite different features, or that the companies recently obtained the same “exclusive” camera sensors from Sony for the Oneplus 9 Pro (test) and Oppo Find X3 (test) could.
Oppo Find X3 Pro from the side. (Photo: t3n)
Despite their proximity to each other, the two companies still had clear USPs, from the super-fluid OxgenOS software from Oneplus to fast charging technologies from Oppo and other features. Now the future smartphones of the two manufacturers are likely to share even more.
This strategic decision doesn’t have to be bad for the customer. The two companies could, for example, go a step further in terms of camera performance and also become faster with software updates. Like Oneplus a little later in explained his forum, OxygenOS and ColorOS are put on a software basis in order to save resources. OxygenOS is still retained, just like ColorOS. The users would not feel anything of the changes, as everything happens under the hood.
It should be positively emphasized that Oneplus has implemented its update strategy for its top models: Starting with the Oneplus 8, the manufacturer promises three major Android versions and four years of security patches. The Nord and Nord CE models will continue to receive Android updates for two years and regular security updates for three years. With the inexpensive Nord variants such as the N10 and N100 and their successors, there is only one major OS update and three-year security patches.
Article updated: New details on software strategy.
