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The End of the OnePlus Experiment
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In a blog post to its community members, OnePlus announced that more resources will be shared with OPPO. It's a move that further amplifies the message OnePlus isn't really OnePlus anymore. It appears like OnePlus has been assimilated by its parent company to be just another brand rather than the "spunky startup" it once was. OnePlus co-founder Pete Lau announced yesterday that OnePlus is becoming part of OPPO, as part of a quasi-merger, suggesting that OnePlus is now a sub-brand. The CEO of OnePlus, Pete Lau acknowledged previous moves which saw the companies’ R&D teams merged and now things are getting tighter.

• “After seeing positive impact from those changes, we’ve decided to further integrate our organization with OPPO,” said the statement.
• “With this deeper integration with OPPO, we will have more resources at hand to create even better products for you. It will also allow us to be more efficient, for example, bringing faster and more stable software updates for OnePlus users,” Lau elaborated. 
• Lau added that OnePlus would “continue to operate independently.”

The change appears to stem from Pete Lau joining OPPO directly to oversee product strategy as chief product officer back in May 2020 and later became senior vice president at the parent company. Fans of OnePlus don’t necessarily want it to be closer to OPPO, as it was at its best when striking out on its own. 

• OnePlus fans might be getting more of what makes OPPO good; it is one of the industry leaders in terms of hardware R&D. 
• But OnePlus has recently caused suffering by releasing unstable, problematic software updates. 
• Pete Lau’s continuing leadership and oversight would appear to be a good thing acknowledging, the “faster and more stable software updates” may solve some problems that OnePlus has been facing.
• The OnePlus Watch release was a disaster, too, while the Nord line hasn’t quite relived the glory days of cheap, cheerful, and value-packed devices.