OnePlus CPU Throttling Will Have A Toggle Switch In Android 12

A former darling of the smartphone market, OnePlus has recently received a lot of flak over one unpopular strategy after another. Its software commitment for some of the OnePlus Nord phones didn't sit well for fans of the company's "Never Settle" philosophy, and its "merger" with OPPO raised doubts about its future. Its biggest offense of late, however, is its secret throttling of performance on OnePlus 9 phones. Now it seems to be reconsidering its position and will offer a compromise, but probably not until next year.

On the one hand, OnePlus' justification for throttling the phone's CPU sounds reasonable enough, citing its users' concerns over battery life and heat regulation. On the other hand, OnePlus committed two errors in its implementation, which is surprising given Apple's high-profile scandal over a similar iPhone throttling scheme. OnePlus intentionally hid this fact from its users and didn't give them any way out of that throttling mechanism.

Now it seems that OnePlus will be addressing at least one of those faults. Before OnePlus launched its new OnePlus Nord 2 phone, which also exhibited that performance throttling behavior, it revealed that it is working on a way for users to switch this "optimized mode" on or off. This way, they can choose whether to prioritize performance over battery life or the other way around. The company's full statement is below:

"Since different chips perform differently and we want to make sure to get the best performance and efficiency out of each one, we've implemented performance optimizations to varying degrees on the OnePlus 9R and Nord 2. However, given the clear feedback from users and media, our R&D team is currently working on adding an option to let users turn on/off this optimized mode and have better control over the performance of their phones. We're targeting to have this solution ready with one of the first builds of OxygenOS 12."

There are a few catches to this promise, though. For one, users will actually need to be aware that such a feature exists or that their phone is running in this "optimized mode," meaning their performance is throttled according to OnePlus' standards. Chances are, the company won't be advertising this rather controversial "feature" anyway.

The other caveat is that it will only be available on OxygenOS 12 with Android 12. Taking into account Android 12's launch date and OnePlus' own testing schedule, we might not see this feature arrive on affected phones until very late this year at the earliest.