CEO defends selective throttling of OnePlus 9 Pro's speed on apps

Last week, AnandTech reported that OnePlus 9 Pro showed inconsistencies in terms of performances in certain apps. Further investigation revealed that the device came with an application detection mechanism that makes the phone underperform when using Twitter, WhatsApp, Chrome, and other popular apps. And, when the user was operating performance testing apps, it used to boost the CPU core speed to score more points on the benchmark chart.

Taking note of the report, Geekbench, a popular performance measuring platform delisted both the OnePlus 9 Pro and 9 series until further notice.

Now, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau has defended the decision of the company. "We don't optimize OnePlus phones for benchmarking scores. We optimize them for real use," Lau said on Twitter and shared a OnePlus blog post link detailing more information.

Evan Z, Global Product Team member, OnePlus added that the company's R&D team maintains a list of most popular apps present in the Google Play Store. They actually conducted tests on Chrome, Twitter, Zoom, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Discord, Microsoft Office, and also on its own OnePlus apps to check if the throttling of CPU core speeds doesn't negatively impact the user experience. Only after proper testing and feedback, it decided to go ahead with software optimisation to make the phone use only slower CPU cores to operate select apps.

It should be noted that the OnePlus 9 series come with a 5nm class Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 octa-core chipset (1 x 2.84 GHz Kryo 680 + 3 x 2.42 GHz Kryo 680 + 4 x 1.80 GHz Kryo 680).

So, in layman terms, whenever the OnePlus 9 Pro owner is using Chrome to browse the internet, only the 1.8Ghz Kryo 680 is activated to perform the task on the phone. But when using a Geekbench or any gaming app, the phone's software ensures the faster 2.84Ghz Kryo 680 is activated.

The company says that reducing the CPU frequency in these aforementioned scenarios will lower the power consumption and improves heat dissipation while maintaining a smooth experience.

Though the intention seems good for improving the user experience, the company is guilty of not letting the consumer know the real truth. It will good if OnePlus apologise for keeping the patrons in the dark and be more open above its software optimisation programme in the future.

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