Save Battery, OnePlus Limits Performance Of Some Popular Apps

Oneplus phones, intentionally limit the performance of certain applications to save battery. (photo credit: Denis Cherkashin/unsplash)

JAKARTA - Smartphone manufacturer OnePlus has admitted that they are limiting the performance of more than 300 Android apps to optimize battery life on OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro devices.

A report from AnAndTech found that the actual performance of a number of apps including Chrome, Twitter, Instagram, Office, Zoom, YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and Strava are now also being restricted.

“We've detected that OnePlus blacklisted popular apps from its fastest core, causing slowdowns in common workloads such as web browsing. We've confirmed that (a) benchmarks or (b) unknown apps are getting full performance. Most of the top popular non-benchmarked apps also suffer performance degradation,” wrote Andrei Frumusanu of AnAndTech.

"It's possible to increase battery life at the expense of performance, but it means that the regular benchmark results are rather useless for the user experience," said Andrei.

This isn't the first time smartphone companies have limited app performance to improve battery life. Apple should apologize for slowing down older iPhone 6 models without notifying users to increase battery life.

The smartphone giant was fined 25 million euros (Rp 430 billion) for secretly slowing down devices, imposed by France's competition and fraud watchdog. Samsung was also sued for cheating on benchmarks for the Galaxy S4, and was forced to pay $13.4 million.

As a result of this OnePlus action, GeekBench removed the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro from its Android Benchmark Chart.

“Our top priority has always been to provide a great user experience with our products. Partly based on quick action on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, several users told us about some areas where we could improve battery life and device temperature settings," a OnePlus spokesperson said in a statement.

“As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize device performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the processor requirements of the app with the most appropriate power. This has helped provide a seamless experience while reducing power consumption," the spokesperson added.

"While this may affect device performance in some benchmark apps, our focus as always is on doing what we can to improve device performance for our users," he added.