OnePlus admits to throttling popular apps to save battery life
1Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/8/22568107/oneplus-9-pro-battery-life-app-throttling-benchmarks
Reported today in The Verge.
OnePlus admits to throttling popular apps to save battery life
OnePlus has confirmed that it deliberately reduces performance in "many of the most popular apps" in order to improve battery life on its latest OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro phones. The issue arose following testing by Anandtech's Andrei Frumusanu, who called the situation "rather baffling" after discovering slowdown in a wide range of prominent apps from Google's Play Store.
Anandtech's conclusion is that OnePlus is "blacklisting popular applications away from its fastest cores, causing slowdown in typical workloads such as web browsing." The site tested Chrome and Twitter performance extensively, but concluded that the slowdown "applies to pretty much everything that has any level of popularity in the Play Store." That's said to cover all Google apps, all Microsoft Office apps, and all notable social media apps and web browsers, though some complex games like Genshin Impact are reportedly unaffected.
Some phone manufacturers have been caught in the past artificially boosting performance so that their devices run unreasonably fast in benchmarks. That isn't quite what's happening here; while benchmark apps seem to be running within expectations, it's the performance of "regular" apps that's been reduced. Nevertheless, popular testing tool GeekBench describes OnePlus' approach as "benchmark manipulation" and has removed the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro from its Android benchmark chart.
OnePlus confirmed to XDA Developers that this is intended behavior designed to improve battery life. Here's the full statement:
"Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pr