OnePlus just can't catch a break these days — and it's pretty much the company's own fault. Right on the heels of a praiseworthy update commitment extension that had us excited to increase our review score, news drops that OnePlus has been throttling some of the most popular apps to better manage battery life and heat. After that, the Android 12 based Oxygen OS 12 update landed, and it was not a good time. In short, the days of a scrappy upstart are over, and a more mature OnePlus is stumbling even as it succeeds. Is this just a phase the company has to work through after the Oppo merger, or a sign of something worse?

SPECS

SoC

Snapdragon 888

RAM

8/12GB (LPDDR5)

Storage

128/256GB (UFS 3.1)

Display

6.7" 1440x3216 120Hz (525 ppi, LTPO, adaptive from 1-120Hz, 10-bit, Gorilla Glass)

Battery

4,500mAh w/ Warp Charge 65T (65W wired) and Warp Charge 50 Wireless

Rear cameras

Primary: 48MP f/1.8 (23mm equivalent, IMX789, 1/1.43")

Ultra-wide

50MP f/2.2 (14mm equivalent, IMX766, 1/1.56")

Telephoto

8MP (3.3x zoom) f/2.4

Monochrome

2MP

Front camera

16MP f/2.4 fixed-focus

Software

OxygenOS 12 (Android 12)

Connectivity

Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, 2x2 MIMO Wi-Fi (dual-band, up to Wi-Fi 6), 5G (including mmWave in US)

IP rating

IP68

Measurements

163.2 x 73.6 x 8.7mm, 197g

Headphone jack

No

Misc

Alert slider, in-display optical FP sensor, stereo speakers (via earpiece), single-SIM

Colors

Morning Mist, Forest Green, Stellar Black

Price

Starting at $969 (8GB/128GB)

THE GOOD

Screen

Smooth, bright, accurate colors, and generally uniform — it's a good display.

Update commitment

OnePlus extended its update promise to three years of OS upgrades and four years of security patches, making it one of the category-leading options.

Speed

Among the fastest phones you can buy right now, though OnePlus has been caught throttling performance in popular apps, making speeds inconsistent.

Alert slider

OnePlus' trademark feature lets you flip between ringer modes faster and more easily than any other Android phone, and I always love it.

Comfort tone

Again, I don't understand why every phone doesn't have this feature. Ambient light-matching color makes everything easier on the eyes, and every phone at every price should have it.

Wired charging speed

OnePlus' 65W charging is the fastest you can get in the US, and I can't stress how convenient it is. This may sound dramatic, but super-fast charging like this changes how you use a phone.

Wireless charging speed

50W is ridiculously fast — faster than any non-OnePlus phone in the US can charge with a wire. Insane.

Camera colors

The Hasselblad colors are great and can sometimes be much closer to what the eye sees.

THE NOT SO GOOD

Update quality

The company has a dubious record for prompt OS updates with a history of buggy releases and an inconsistent release cycle at times. Oxygen OS is no longer what it used to be, now that it's just a Color OS spin-off. And sometimes those updates reduce...

Performance

Although some early benchmarks showed unexplainable incongruities, it appears OnePlus has been further diminishing device performance with updates, "optimizing" power consumption in a way that selectively makes certain apps worse.

So-so battery life

It's more consistent now, but 6 hours of screen-on time is only mediocre for a phone of this size and price.

Oxygen OS isn't a first-class ROM anymore

OnePlus's flavor of Android is loaded with tiny weird issues, and once new models land and OnePlus forgets about this phone, that's probably only going to get worse.

General camera performance

While colors are improved, OnePlus' processing is still muddy, detail-destroying, and generally inconsistent. It's "better" than prior OnePlus phones, but not as good as the competition.

FP sensor location

It's too close to the chin and not very ergonomic to hit.

5G carrier compatibility

5G in the US remains a bad time, and this phone only plays nice with T-Mobile and Verizon right now. AT&T customers will only have LTE.

Price

OnePlus never actually delivered the $969 base model to the US, as it previously claimed it would, and $1069 is too much for what you get here.

Design, hardware, what's in the box

The OnePlus 9 Pro is a big phone — but this time around, I'd say it's "pleasantly" big with its 6.7" screen. While numerical dimensions aren't' that different from the 8 Pro or 7 Pro, it is slightly shorter and narrower, which makes a surprising difference. The OnePlus 9 Pro is much easier to hold for a Plus/Max/Ultra-sized phone, and right at the upper edge of what I'd consider comfortable. It's large, but it's not unwieldy and just the right weight for the size.

Like most flagship phones, the OnePlus 9 Pro has an aluminum and glass body that feels solid — though this time around, the camera bump's protective glass has an exposed frosted edge, which may not be the most durable design. The frame down the left and right side is also a little more narrow than on prior OnePlus phones, reminiscent of older Samsung Galaxy S phones.

We reviewed the glossy morning mist color, which has a weird, slightly pixelated gradient on the back and looks everywhere from silver to blue depending on the light. I'd stick with one of the other seemingly nicer-looking matte options if you get one.

OnePlus fans will note that although the company gave up the alert slider on the recent N10 5G, it's here on the OnePlus 9 Pro. In case you aren't familiar with the feature, it's a three-position hardware switch that lets you adjust between three ringer modes — ring, vibrate, and silent — on-demand with just a single flick, sort of like you can with the switch on an iPhone. Low-key it's one of the best features OnePlus phones have, and yet they're alone among Android devices to get it.

The power button is on the right side of the phone beneath the alert slider, and the volume keys are on the left. On the bottom, you have the USB Type-C port, the SIM tray (this time around just single-SIM for the US unlocked model), a hole for the bottom mic, and a single speaker port. The top of the phone is bare, excluding another mic hole. Continuing last year's trend, the OnePlus 9 Pro is IP-rated, regardless of where you buy it.

The OnePlus 9 Pro has a hole-punch display, with a mid-sized hole for the camera in the top left corner — large enough that the status bar is a little bit bigger to accommodate it. It's also a fantastic screen, at 6.7" across (excluding the rounded corners), 1440p, and 525ppi, with a 120Hz refresh rate. It's big, it's sharp, it's smooth, and it's bright.

This is also a new kind of screen that beats the high refresh rate panels of the last two years in one very significant way: it has an LTPO backplane. You can ignore the acronym — the takeaway is that this new screen uses less power and the refresh rate can be adaptive. OnePlus claims it's the first phone that can scale all the way down to 1Hz from 120Hz, and we're told it uses up to 50% less power compared to last year's screens.

It's still a curved display (which I actually enjoy, though that's not a popular opinion), but OnePlus managed to cut down the radius to the point that any edge-distortion is minimal.

I also want to point out that the OnePlus 9 Pro is one of the first high refresh rate screens I've used that does not flicker for me in any circumstance. It's subtle, but phones like the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4 series can flicker at certain lower brightness levels as they change between refresh rates, and I ran into a similar problem with the Galaxy S21 at maximum brightness outdoors, but the 9 Pro's has no such issue. And while the 9 Pro is not perfectly uniform at low brightness levels, it's close enough — no one should be complaining about splotchy backgrounds with dark themes at night if retail models match what I received. It also doesn't crush blacks noticeably or have any other undesirable characteristics that I've noticed.

If you've yet to use a phone with an in-display fingerprint sensor, the one on the OnePlus 9 Pro will probably blow your mind. Even just a very quick tap is enough to get you in. The performance gap has finally closed between these optical sensors and the ultrasonic ones made by Qualcomm and used in Samsung's flagships, which may be slightly faster, but the differences are slight — either way, you can reliably and quickly unlock your phone.

However, the fingerprint sensor in the 9 Pro does have one big flaw: It's way too far down on the screen, close to the bottom edge. It's not ergonomic, but it's also just an awkward spot to hit accurately. Some long-term OnePlus users have also had issues with burn-in from the optical sensor's display-based illumination.

The OnePlus 9 Pro has stereo speakers in the usual fashion, aided by the earpiece. Audio quality is good for a phone, and it got loud enough to fill my deck with sound as I luxuriated in the early spring weather, though bass was lacking. Call quality was also generally good. Haptic performance was better than the Android average (especially compared to last year's phones and the S21 series), but not quite as good to me as phones like the Pixel 4, not that Android phones do as many nice things with haptics compared to iPhones.

In the box, you get the Warp Charge 65 power adapter, a OnePlus-themed bright red Type-C to Type-C cable, a SIM ejector tool, and the usual documentation. There's no bundled case, as with some prior OnePlus phones, but you do get a pre-applied screen protector.

Software, performance, and battery

OnePlus's software experience has been a rollercoaster over the last year with subsequent updates. Now that things have settled down with Android 12, I feel comfortable saying: It's not good.

I won't go over every feature, but there are a few noteworthy highlights, like OnePlus' Quick Gestures, that let you swipe around the screen while it's off to trigger certain commands. There's also the ambient display, which offers tons of different themes with details like upcoming events, music information, and even details like how much you're using your phone. There's also a quick reply in landscape feature, "App cloner" (previously called Parallel Apps) for installing duplicate copies of apps, a video interpolation feature — it goes on.

One of my favorite features of OnePlus phones is Comfort Tone, which adapts the display's white point temperature to better match your environment, similar to Apple's True Tone. Every phone should have it, especially considering TCL managed to put it on a $250 phone last year, and I resent that Google dropped its similar AmbientEQ feature in all of last year's Pixels.

I am glad that OnePlus is switching more and more to using Google apps — at least, in the US. The stock launcher has a Discover-integrated left pane, and the default SMS and call apps are both Google's, which is a good move. If only Google would license the Pixel-exclusive Assistant features like Automatic Call Screen to OnePlus.

I did run into some bugs using the phone, like poor Bluetooth audio performance, with frequent disconnections (using OnePlus' own Buds) even in uncongested areas. The latest Android 12 update changed things drastically for the worse, though. If you don't like Oppo's Color OS, you won't like the new Oxygen OS — it's basically the same thing with a skin now. It's also pretty damn buggy, and OnePlus even had to pull the update initially. Surprisingly, though, I didn't run into any major issues with delayed notifications, as I have on prior OnePlus phones due to how they handle memory management.

OnePlus's update commitment was recently extended, too. Long ago, its two years of OS updates and three years of security patches promise was competitive. But, after it fell behind rising promises by competitors, OnePlus now guarantees three years of OS version updates and four years of security patches, making it among the longer-lasting devices you can get — though still not the best. However, the company is slow to roll out major OS updates and tends to ignore its older devices. That is, when it isn't just releasing buggy software on them. Contrary to my initial expectations, OnePlus didn't even give the 9 Pro the software attention it deserved in 2021. I'm very concerned about how it will fare in 2022 or 2023 when the company has moved on to newer models, where its reputation of further dropping the ball precedes itself. However, you can at least be sure that the OnePlus 9 Pro is secure and safe to use all the way to 2024.

General performance was quite good, as you'd expect for the latest Snapdragon 888, though I did have one weird hiccup: Something about touch latency felt odd or a little laggy at times, especially while typing fast in Gboard. The company has also been caught after launch throttling the phone's performance in many popular apps, seeking better power and heat optimization. That means, though the phone should have oodles more power than most of us will need or use, you may not always be able to use all of it. That raises the question: Why pay for the best possible performance if you aren't getting it?

Anecdotal gaming performance was good for me, with titles running smoothly and often taking advantage of the high refresh rate. OnePlus even has an optimized "Hyper Touch" feature for reduced input latency in certain games, starting with titles like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty Mobile (among others), though future titles will require support on developers' end to get the feature.

Although the Snapdragon 888 seems to run hotter than prior chipsets, I didn't run into any issues with palpable heat on the 9 Pro, as I did on the Galaxy S21. However, another of us at AP did have a problem with the phone overheating a bit while fast wireless charging during the CPU-chugging first-time setup, so your mileage may vary. To be fair, the latest flagship chipsets all run a lot hotter these days than they did even a couple years ago.

Carrier compatibility is also the same 5G mess we're used to in the US. The phone launched with T-Mobile 5G support, and picked up Verizon certification just a few days later, but AT&T customers are left out in the cold with a max of 4G.

Battery life varied more than I'd like to see. Sometimes I'd get around five and a half hours of screen-on time in a day, sometimes about that same number across three days, and all without much difference in how I used it. So far, it seems like Qualcomm's new 888 SoC is a regression (or, at least, not much of an improvement) over last year's 865 when it comes to power efficiency.

We can't talk about battery life without mentioning the new 50W wireless charging, even though it's powered by a separate, optional accessory, and the combined price is a bit steep. The wireless charger itself is an extra $70, but you'll need to spend $35 more on top of that if you want to keep your wired charging at the same time — the charger doesn't come with its own brick, and it needs a Warp Charge 65 unit to work. That means the wireless charger will actually run you more like $105, which is a bit ridiculous.

Furthermore, the wireless charger is kind of loud with the fan on, and the fan stays on constantly while the phone is docked, even once it's fully charged, unless you kick things over into "bedtime mode" for lower-power fan-free operation. At least OnePlus made the cable separate from the wireless charger this time. It also works with the phone docked horizontally, and the sweet spot for the charger is large.

Above: About the highest temperature the battery reported while wirelessly charging. Below: The charger.

Across a handful of wireless charging tests, I recorded peak temperatures around 40C (104F) for the battery, and 37C (98F) on the exterior, both of which should be well within safe margins. And it's crazy fast — toss it on the charger for half an hour, and you'll be pretty close to full. OnePlus claims 0-70% in 30 minutes, but my own tests seem to actually beat those numbers. I'm pretty sure that the OnePlus 9 Pro charges faster wirelessly than any other non-OnePlus phone in the US does with a wire.

On that note, the company also slightly upgraded its Warp Charge 65 wired charging. OnePlus tells us the phone sports reduced internal resistance to charge faster — it still maxes at 65W, but it's able to sustain that rate longer. You are basically guaranteed a full charge (or very close) in half an hour, and you can literally sit with the screen on and watch percentage points tick by.

I really can't stress how convenient OnePlus' wired and wireless charging speeds are. Although thankfully it hasn't happened with this phone yet, the fast charging on prior OnePlus models has saved my skin more than once in an emergency, and I'm really glad that the company keeps pushing the limit on charging speeds. It's one of the best features here.

Cameras

So this is going to be a complicated subject, and I may even dedicate an entire post to it at some point, but I do think OnePlus at least partly made good on its promise to improve its camera performance with Hasselblad in real, tangible ways. But while the partnership is a little more than just a logo tossed on the back of the phone, OnePlus has a long ways to go.

Before I go any further, I should say that I personally love what OnePlus does with colors on the 9 Pro. Whether it's attributable to the new partnership or not, I think the OnePlus 9 Pro often comes closer to what my eye sees compared to other phones. It can still get confused and wash out a scene or oversaturate, though, as prior OnePlus phones did. Twilight photos also tend to come out a little over-exposed, though general dynamic range in most scenes is good. (However, sometimes it can crush shadows and blacks pretty badly.)

With the new, larger sensor, depth of field is much-increased, the laser sensor provides fast autofocus, and HDR capture times have been reduced. All that means improved low-light performance, some artistic flair with stronger bokeh in up-close shots, and very fast photo capture with almost no shutter lag. I can almost always snag the shot I want during quick action without missing the moment.

Above: Left to right, from wide-angle to telephoto (3.3x optical, no digital zoom enabled).

Left: Pixel 4a in Night Sight. Right: OnePlus 9 Pro in Nightscape.

Low-light performance is interesting. I actually found in one particular example that the 9 Pro beat the Pixel when it came to ultra-low-light detail (above, see the shingles on the roof), but it has a tendency for strong lens flare as well:

Low-light gallery.

And though it's not a fair comparison, here's a last set of the Pixel 4a vs the OnePlus 9 Pro comparing the various nighttime shooting modes. Even though the Pixel had a nearly three-minute exposure for its astrophotography mode, the 9 Pro did beat it when it came to the definition of the individual stars and the lines for objects blocking the view, all with a capture time of just a few seconds. OnePlus' camera hardware itself is clearly several generations ahead of Google's and I look forward to the day we get a Pixel with a crazy-big sensor like this.

Above: Pixel 4a in Astrophotography mode (left) and Night Sight (right). Below: OnePlus 9 Pro in Nightscape (left) and auto/normal mode (right).

A camera is never blanket good or bad, and outside the unfortunately strong lens flare, I actually think the 9 Pro can do a good job in low-light. But my examples still show the sorts of inconsistencies that indicate unpredictable and unreliable performance. In short: The OnePlus 9 Pro doesn't usually leave me saying "wow" on a positive note after shooting a photo, as the Pixel so frequently can.

Super macro.

Most smartphones that advertise a macro camera use a cheap and bad dedicated unit. OnePlus instead uses its wide-angle camera for up-close macro shots, and it's a much better approach. However, the minimum focus distance this time is a bit further out compared to last year's 8 Pro, so you won't enjoy quite the same up-close perspective — it's still miles better than the junky dedicated macro cameras most phones with one have, though.

Nice straight lines from the ultra-wide — almost no distortion.

OnePlus also touts the wide-angle's reduced distortion and massive sensor, and it is very good. Lines are straighter, and noise seems reduced. Dynamic range is also very good for a wide-angle. But even though OnePlus plays up the improvements, I still find that it still mangles fine details a little, as does the telephoto.

P1 monochrome mode vs "Mono" with the extra sensor. Same scene in color below.

The last of the four cameras on the back of the phone is a dedicated monochrome sensor. We're told it's used for a handful of undescribed things, but so far as I can tell, it only really impacts a single "Mono" monochrome filter mode. As in the case of the OnePlus N10 5G, I find that makes for slightly richer tones and contrast in that one black and white mode, but you'll probably never use it. There's also a new tilt-shift mode but its results are about as bad as what you can get on your own with GIMP and a gauss blur, it's not even worth discussing.

I'm of two minds when it comes to OnePlus' "Pro" camera mode: On one hand, you can use it to get a tough shot where you know you need a specific exposure setting, but in general, its utility is limited, and you'll usually get better results from the normal mode — in this era of computational photography, manual camera controls hurt more than they help unless you really know what you're doing. OnePlus touts 12-bit RAW capture in Pro mode, though, so it could come in handy for some folks.

The telephoto, which can be pretty muddy with faces and hazy.

OnePlus has a long-standing reputation for wormy, muddy processing that tends to destroy the texture of faces or fine details, and so far, that's still an issue with the 9 Pro. It's not a small problem, and for some of us at Android Police, that makes this phone a $1,000 non-starter. While it does do a good job with strong contrasting edges, fine low-contrast details tend to get ruined. So the edges of objects or details like tree branches can come out nice, but it still manages to destroy the finer more subtle texture in scenes. On top of that, the telephoto is regularly washed out and outright bad. And it's upsetting, because I really do like some of the photos I took with the 9 Pro, but I just can't rely on it to do a good job every time like I can with a Pixel.

Judging video performance is a whole other beast, and I am a bad videographer. However, the 9 Pro does do 4K 120fps video for high-res slow-motion, it can do 8K at 30fps, and it supports HDR in video, which is ostensibly great for recording in low-light. I hesitate to include any of my examples, but video quality seemed fine to me.

I know I sound like I'm being hard on the 9 Pro, but that's just because I want OnePlus to compete with the smartphone photography big boys, and though prices continue to rise, it still doesn't. Last year, I even preferred OnePlus' camera quality to Samsung's, though my opinion has switched again comparing 2021 models, especially as prices here have risen and fallen elsewhere.

Ultimately, I really like certain things about the 9 Pro's camera — especially the colors I get from it, though camera performance can be very subjective. But the benefits of this Hasselblad partnership are overstated, and the quality of results remain OnePlus-inconsistent. If I had to choose a phone based on photo quality today, it would be a cheaper Pixel or a more expensive Galaxy S21 Ultra.

Should you buy it? Rating 6.5/10

OnePlus 9 Pro

When OnePlus granted the 9 Pro an extra year of OS and security updates with a new three/four year commitment, I was ready to increase our review score and give the phone our Most Wanted Award — I promised as much in our original review. But the company has also been caught reducing app performance for some 300 titles in a way that makes a substantial (but varied) impact, and the Android 12 Oxygen OS 12 update was particularly low-quality, bringing down the overall experience. Customers spending up to $1,000 on a phone shouldn't have to put up with any of these issues. So what was supposed to be a celebration at a review score increase is now a score drop.

The 9 Pro still has plenty of great individual features, and there are things about OnePlus phones I love — the alert slider, the company's now-excellent screens, the usually fantastic first-party accessories, and the crazy-fast charging, among others — but I can't recommend it to everyone. It's a phone with so too many "gotchas," and OnePlus has a consistent reputation now of dropping the ball on update quality. When competitors at around the same price do so much better, the OnePlus 9 Pro is a bad choice. The Android 10 rollout for the OnePlus 6 was botched last year, and this year the OnePlus 7 series had similar issues on top of being even later. I have zero faith that OnePlus will gracefully handle the Android 12 update for the 8 series next year, and it already botched the update Oxygen OS 12 update for the 9 Pro. And that's ignoring the fact that Oxygen OS just isn't as nice as it used to be under the new Oppo management.

OnePlus never even sold the base model it promised would come to the US. At $1069 it's an awful value, and at the current $899 promo price, it's still up against some of the best Android phones you can get. If I had to buy a phone right now, I'd probably opt for a Galaxy S21+ or get a Pixel 6 or 6 Pro. But if you can wait just a little while, Samsung's new models are on the horizon, and the anticipated OnePlus 10 might be better.

If you focus on a handful of features, the OnePlus 9 Pro is a great phone, with a super-smooth screen, the fastest wired and wireless charging, and a solid long-term update commitment, in a root-and-ROM-friendly package. I even enjoy the camera — though it's not as good as the competition. But take a step back, looking at the forest and not the trees, and the 9 Pro's flaws (chief among them: Software) are inescapable.

Buy it if...

  • Super-fast charging and a great screen are important features.
  • You're a fan of OnePlus phones and want the latest one.
  • You plan on keeping the phone 3-4 years but...
  • You aren't worried about poor software or buggy updates.

Don't buy it if...

  • You can spend more, or you're on a budget.
  • You want the best smartphone camera you can get.
  • The best performance is a priority — OnePlus throttles hard for some apps.
  • You're on AT&T — no 5G.
  • You value software in a smartphone.

Where to buy

The phone is available at the following retailers:

UPDATE: 2021/04/30 11:38am PDT BY RYNE HAGER

One month later

As I expected would happen, OnePlus has fixed several of the problems I ran into in my early time with the 9 Pro — but not all of them. While my connectivity issues and the problem with wide-color content I noted in my original review have been fixed, and I haven't seen the camera randomly open itself in the last week, there is still some general software weirdness surrounding automatic dark theme in some apps, and something about touch input still feels subtly delayed or wrong when typing quickly in Gboard. Bluetooth audio performance also remains mediocre for me, but the company has done a generally good job attending to launch issues, as it usually does. But one area where I'm not sure there's been too much improvement in updates has been the camera.

I like OnePlus's colors and dynamic range, and I love the narrow depth of field you can get, though sometimes it throws off focus.

Although OnePlus continues to claim photo improvements with updates, and things do seem slightly different in certain scenes (though I have no direct before/after update comparisons to offer), the overall performance remains inconsistent — very nearly the company's trademark at this point.

These two photos were taken back to back.

As I've said before, I can get some good photos out of the camera, but I just never know what to expect until I see the results, while with a phone like a Pixel or a Galaxy S, I usually have a good idea of what I'm going to get when I tap the shutter. Often the camera seems to over-expose, and though dynamic range can sometimes wow me, it can also be just plain weird.

Sometimes things just look weird and unreal, though. What's going on in those trees, and why does everything seem equally bright? This isn't quite what I saw in the viewfinder or real life.

Updates also seem to have made battery life more consistent for me, but I still hesitate to praise it. Now I'm usually maxing out at around 6 hours of screen-on time. (For context, I usually see slightly above the average numbers when it comes to battery life based on how I use my phones.) While six hours is good, it's not fantastic for a phone this size or this price, and we came closer to eight on the S21 Ultra in our review.

AP's Artem Russakovskii has also run into issues with the camera, including it halting mid-recording with unspecified errors, focus problems, wildly oversaturated blues, and even overheating. On top of that, he's run into more general software woes, like Gmail and Calendar failing to refresh in the background (potentially tied to OnePlus's known background app management issues), Chrome throwing out of memory errors, an annoying picture-in-picture bug, and apps disappearing from the recents menu. Battery saver mode even turns off auto-rotate when it kicks in, and Oxygen OS loves to spit strange and continuous notifications, like continuously advertising Qualcomm's aptX support, random "draining battery" notifications, and annoying "Advanced Message" prompts for paired BT devices.

I haven't run into all of these same issues in my time with the 9 Pro — we all use our phone in different ways, and Artem is known to be a little harder on his hardware than most — but I have come to recognize these sorts of issues as characteristic of OnePlus's software these days. Keeping abreast when it comes to updates for older OnePlus models, all I hear are issues, and the company's timeline for major updates seems to be falling further behind each year.

This is all especially frustrating because OnePlus used to make great software. I don't know what changed — maybe the flood of new models is drowning the software team? — but I'm starting to get LG vibes from the situation, and I'm half-expecting a OnePlus Software Update Center to be announced soon. (Update: And the other shoe drops with software merger with Oppo.) Frankly, I just don't trust OnePlus phones for the long haul anymore, and at this price, you have to, especially when Samsung is doing miles better at basically the same cost.

OnePlus's recent pattern of behavior also has me a little sketched out. Despite insisting that the OnePlus 9 Pro would cost $969, here we are over a month since sales started, and all you can buy is the more expensive $1069 model — still. I know there are supply chain shortages, but OnePlus releases new models twice a year typically. While the 9 Pro might stick around longer, we could be coming up on 20% of its retail-facing life with only the most expensive model available, and that feels a little deceitful in the absence of more information.

In the end, I wish I could recommend the 9 Pro. I really do. OnePlus phones have historically been among my favorites — the OnePlus 7 Pro blew my mind, and though I didn't love the OnePlus 8 Pro quite as much, it was still a fantastic buy — but I just don't feel the same about the company's products in 2021. Something critical has changed for the worse, and between the 9 Pro and the OnePlus Watch, I think the company needs to press pause here, catch a breath, and consider its future. Sure, it's growing like crazy, but at what cost, and is it that growth going to be sustainable if they can't catch up in other key areas?

All that discussion is out of scope here, though. When it comes down to it, unless you really want a phone to root/ROM (which is something OnePlus phones remain really great for), I think you can do better than the 9 Pro.

UPDATE: 2021/07/09 12:40pm PDT BY RYNE HAGER

Updates are good, and updates are bad

When OnePlus announced that the 9 series would be getting an extra year of security updates, we were really happy about it, since the move extends the lifespan of the company's phones quite meaningfully, giving owners another entire year of value and security. It's a big deal, we promised to increase our review score if they did, and the company should be rewarded for it. On the other hand, it was revealed that OnePlus has been reducing performance with those same updates, with power optimizations diminishing app performance quite meaningfully for many popular applications. In short: OnePlus's updates are good, and OnePlus's updates are bad.

Instead of the review score increase to 8/10 I planned to give the OnePlus 9 Pro, it has been decided that this recent change merits a decrease instead to 7/10. After all, what's the point of longer updates if they're making your phone worse, not better?

The OnePlus 9 Pro changes performance profiles for popular apps, and some hurt performance pretty badly (image via Anandtech).

OnePlus phones have long been known for their anecdotal snappiness, but that has changed recently. As I noted in our original review, even just the keyboard felt a little laggy at times on the OnePlus 9 Pro, though I have a memory of OnePlus phones as speed demons. Subtle tweaks to performance are one thing, but these adjustments are the sort of heavy-handed changes that can make a user-facing negative impact. And ultimately, even if Qualcomm's hot-running hardware this year is to blame for the performance throttling, OnePlus had plenty of time to notice a problem during development and come up with a better solution — Samsung seems to have managed, as an example.

I sincerely hope OnePlus can turn things around and improve performance for the OnePlus 9 Pro, and we've reached out to the company both to let them know of our score change today and to see if they have any information to provide regarding if or when they'll be addressing the problem. In the meantime, what was supposed to be a reward for extending updates is now a penalization, and I wish it weren't so.

UPDATE: 2021/12/30 16:45 EST BY RYNE HAGER

Software drags down a premium experience

2021 has been quite a year for OnePlus and the 9 Pro. Usually, products either a) get better with time and updates in the short-term or b) slowly decline, but the OnePlus 9 Pro has forged its own slightly different path. Like no other phone in memory, my opinion regarding the 9 Pro has swung wildly back and forth over the last year. Now, following the Android 12 update and (based on leaks) on the eve of its successor, my opinion has settled in: The 9 Pro is a firm pass.

If you haven’t followed all the drama, here’s a brief summary. Following the merger with Oppo (which really just formalized a structure that was already partly there), OnePlus apparently gave up on its own software efforts. Under this new, seemingly tighter leash, Oxygen OS is simply a skinned version of Oppo’s Color OS. By itself, this wasn’t an appreciated move — most folks in the US market just aren't fans of the Color OS, even if it’s popular elsewhere and has a coat of paint on top of it. On top of that, when the transition happened with the Android 12 update, OnePlus botched it.

OP9 Pro OOS 12 hero

Reports of issues were widespread. Anecdotally, I couldn’t even connect to anything other than 2G data at times on mine, and some settings for built-in apps were straight-up missing until I wiped app data. Color OS’s influence was also palpable in a way not many enjoyed — you could feel that something had changed. Ultimately, OnePlus pulled the Android 12 update. It’s rolling out again (as OnePlus continues to whittle down bugs), but the company’s reputation when it comes to delivering software updates was already tarnished, and I don’t even know what you’d call it now. Whatever label you want to attach, years of consistent and predictable problems leave me very comfortable saying that OnePlus no longer offers a good software experience.

This is a huge problem for the company; it's not okay to punt on the software anymore. The Pixels are proof that good software can often make up for mediocre hardware, and that’s a big chunk of why we love Google's mid-range models so much. And the opposite is true as well: Lousy software can drag great hardware down. Sadly, that’s what’s happened to the OnePlus 9 Pro.

I used to feel that OnePlus phones were still good for fans of the company and its products that had grown to like Oxygen OS, but now that it’s made the trip to an entirely different software base, even that advantage is gone. Unless you get an incredible deal or absolutely need a phone that you can root and ROM easily, we just can’t recommend the 9 Pro. Too many other phones beat it in too many other ways. And, unless OnePlus can improve its software beyond what seems feasible or edge out a substantial price advantage over its competitors, I just don’t see that changing.

Though I included it in our own internal ballot when we voted for our 2021 phone of the year, the OnePlus 9 Pro wasn’t a serious contender — in fact, some fun was poked about it being on the list at all. With all the other great options available to customers right now and OnePlus’s new self-inflicted wounds, all but the most stalwart fans of the brand can skip the 9 Pro.