As more and more OnePlus 9 Pros end up in customers' hands, we're hearing reports that the phones may be prone to overheating — especially while taking photos or recording video. To the surprise of none of our readers, AP's own Artem Russakovskii (of #ArtemsLuck fame) has been running into the problem. Thankfully, OnePlus tells us this is a known issue that will be addressed in updates over the next few weeks.

Reports of the issue are fairly widespread, with a unified thread on the subject at the OnePlus forums now reaching ten pages with dozens of individual confirmations of the issue. It can manifest in a handful of different circumstances, though using the camera seems to be the most common trigger.

OnePlus's camera app also spits a big visible warning among two different messages the phone starts to overheat: "The temperature of your device is currently too high, please pause shotting [sic] for a while to bring it down," and "Unable to take pictures as the phone's temperature is too high."

An Android System notification can also appear in tandem with this, which also notifies you when the phone has cooled enough to be used normally again.

Overheating phones have been a thing for a while, and folks recording tens of minutes of video or playing games in exceptionally high temperatures have run into issues like these for years, but reports indicate this is happening to the OnePlus 9 Pro more frequently than we would expect and at lower potential temperatures. AP's Artem notes that he's run into the issue simply recording a video in circumstances ranging from a sunny 80-degree day to temperatures as low as 70 degrees indoors. A Pixel 5 used alongside it had no such issues.

We've also seen reports of the Galaxy S21 Ultra overheating (especially while using the camera) which raises the question: Is this a OnePlus issue, or a Snapdragon 888 issue? We've noticed that Qualcomm's latest flagship chipset does seem to run hot compared to last year's phones. However, most of those reports are for the Exynos version of the S21.

Anecdotally, I've been unable to trigger the problem on my OnePlus 9 Pro review unit, even while intentionally trying to with back-to-back recording of 4K video at high framerates. The issue could easily vary based on things like background app usage or even on a per-unit basis, for all we know. Some that have run into the issue claim a recent update fixed it, but other reports disagree. Some reports further indicate it could simply be a sensor issue:

Thankfully, we do know one thing: OnePlus is aware of this problem. A company spokesperson tells us that it's a known issue, and that future update(s) expected to land over the next few weeks will address it — hopefully resolving the issue before summer weather makes it worse.