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Yup, OnePlus is deliberately slowing down apps to preserve battery life

More battery life, but at what cost?

oneplus fitness band
Image: KnowTechie

If you own either the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro phone and noticed some of your favorite apps crawling to a complete stop, no, it’s not just you. The company has confirmed that it’s throttling down popular apps to help save the phone’s battery life.

This all came to light when the folks over at Anandtech were performing benchmark tests for an upcoming review of the smartphone. But when they found a large number of well-known apps slowing down more than usual, they knew something was off.

READ MORE: Watch the OnePlus 10 Pro get snapped in half in a basic durability test

Well, as it turns out, their hunch was right. OnePlus recently confirmed to XDA Developers that this is actually intentional and helps preserve the phone’s 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 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we could improve the devices’ battery life and heat management. As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize the devices’ performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app’s processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption. While this may impact the devices’ performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus as always is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users.

What OnePlus is telling us here is that sure, apps are being slowed down, but the average smartphone user isn’t going to notice it. The only thing that’s going to catch it is benchmarking apps, which isn’t a thing most regular people use.

The gist of it is that OnePlus is trying to make their phones last longer for users and hold a bit more battery life. While I personally don’t see a huge issue with this, Apple did have to pay $500 million for similar issues, but Apple’s goal was to get people to upgrade to a new phone.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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