OnePlus just published a recap of its second "Open Ears Forum" from all the way back in May. At the event, it gathered a handful of developers and fans central to the OnePlus community to solicit their feedback. Four months later, the company has revealed a set of changes influenced by that feedback, including more timely kernel sources for Open Betas and a new bounty program for reporting vulnerabilities. Most importantly for customers, though, OnePlus has promised to finally fix how aggressive its software is at killing apps in the background.

For those that are unfamiliar, OnePlus phones running recent versions of the company's OxygenOS version of Android are notorious for killing apps prematurely in the background. They might not be as bad as Google's Pixel 3 when it comes to tossing apps out, but they're more aggressive at it than many other devices. While there have been ways to partially mitigate the effects, they don't always work, and related settings can sometimes reset.

Anecdotally, it has still been a problem for me until recently, even with optimization exceptions in place. And as much of a headache as it may be for customers, the issue is even worse for developers, who can't rely on OnePlus phones to behave like other devices.

In addition to fixing background apps, OnePlus will also promote some custom ROMs as a path forward for customers following end-of-life announcements for devices — a wise move, if it can push them to easily maintained, secure, and updated ROMs like Lineage. Device seeding to developers will also happen more promptly and to a wider number of developers in the future.

OnePlus has enumerated seven total commitments it has prioritized following the Open Ears developer meetup:

  1. Kernel sources to be released on time for all builds including Open Beta build.
  2. We will introduce a Bounty Program for reporting security vulnerabilities.
  3. We will be promoting custom ROMS on OnePlus forums and Social Media for EOL (End of life) devices.
  4. Concerns about apps getting killed in the background due to aggressive battery optimization – to be fixed in upcoming updates.
  5. We will make sure that devices are seeded quicker to developers in the program after the launch of a new device.
  6. We will be expanding the existing device seeding program to include more members.
  7. More OnePlus community meetups to be organized around our developer community.

For more information about some of the changes, as well as photos from the meetup in Goa, India, click through to OnePlus' summary of the event below.

Thanks: osm0sis

Source: OnePlus Forums