OnePlus 8 Pro long-term review

Software

As of this writing, our OnePlus 8 Pro was running on OxygenOS 10.5.13, based on Android 10.

A lot of praise has been heaped on OxygenOS and deservedly so. It's clean, it respects the Android design guidelines set by Google, and it prioritizes speed and efficiency over fancy animations and lengthy transitions. The features are largely useful and don't feel gimmicky and the company has kept a decent track record of providing regular updates.

However, because OnePlus set such a high standard for itself with OxygenOS, we feel like pointing out things that wouldn't be brought up in a review for another Android phone with a more convoluted and bloated UI.

First of all, with the Indian units, OnePlus has tried to include two features, which aren't available elsewhere. One of these is the Red Cable Club, which requires you to create an account and in return, you get features like a 6-month extended warranty, 50% discount on battery replacement, 50GB cloud storage, and more. That may sound appealing to you but in case it doesn't and you don't want to sign up for it, OnePlus doesn't quite respect your decision and leave you alone.

No, instead, you get a permanent option at the top of the Settings that will forever beg you to sign up for this service. Occasionally, OnePlus will also push notifications asking you to sign up for the service. The option in the Settings menu will also get a new badge every time something gets added to the Red Cable Club, even if it's something minor that you don't even notice or care about.

Red Cable Club

OnePlus is also a bit pushy about the 50GB cloud storage. It's the first thing you will see when you open the Gallery app for the first time, a pop up asking you to sign up. The cloud service icon is also permanently present in the app launcher and you can't uninstall it (although it can be put in the hidden folder in the launcher). The cloud service will also show up in the share sheet every time you are trying to share something.

The cloud service provides backup for various things on the phone but for anyone with a Google account, it would seem a bit redundant. Moreover, the service isn't even run by OnePlus but is instead provided by a Singapore-based company named Bravo Unicorn Pte. Ltd. Why OnePlus expects its users to trust a relatively unknown company when they could just use Google's services is beyond us. Even if Google doesn't offer to backup everything that OnePlus does, it's still better than trusting an unknown company.

These might seem like minor annoyances but sometimes this is how things tend to start before completely going off the rails. What's curious is that OnePlus only offers these intrusions in the Indian market, where it sells its devices for a lower cost than other regions. The Red Cable Club does include some services that include partnerships with other brands so this does seem like a way for OnePlus to recover some of the cost of selling the phone at a lower cost in this market.

Again, these are far from things like having your own app store to hawk promoted apps, filling up phones with promotional content, or just leaving aside all morals and straight-up showing ads on your phones. But we hope OnePlus is being very careful with the path it is seemingly heading down because if it starts compromising on its values to get into a price war with other brands then the days of clean OnePlus software will become a thing of the past.

Performance

The OnePlus 8 Pro is a proper 2020 flagship. This means it has the highest-end (at the time of release) Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset, up to 12GB of LPDDR5 memory, and up to 256GB UFS 3.0 2-LANE storage. OnePlus has never skimped on the hardware specs of its flagship devices and it wasn't going to start with the OnePlus 8 Pro. This is pretty much as the top of the line as it gets (again, at the time of launch when there was no Snapdragon 865+).

However, having the top of the line hardware is just half the battle won. OnePlus also spends a considerable amount of time and engineering effort into optimizing its software. Several key aspects of OxygenOS have been tweaked to shave off a few milliseconds here and there. This, combined with the 120Hz display means the performance is damn near flawless.

The OnePlus 8 Pro just mows through applications and interfaces. The user experience is both fast and fluid, once again in large parts thanks to the software optimizations and the high refresh rate display. It's difficult to get any app to faze this device, largely because it can just brute force its way through them.

But it's possible; Twitter for Android, for example, is a completely irredeemable piece of trash software that cannot be made to work smoothly even with a supercomputer. Scrolling remains choppy in this app and even the Snapdragon 865 inside the OnePlus 8 Pro cannot smooth things out here. Another pile of stuttery mess is Google Play Store; it has improved over the years but it will still stutter while loading in new app titles.

These are moments where you realize sometimes you just can't get a smooth and fast experience no matter how much money you spend because at the end of the day you are still at the mercy of inept developers. However, by and large, the OnePlus 8 Pro does feel invincible in action and is generally an absolute pleasure to use.

Games are another matter. While the device has enough power to run any title on the Play Store at its maximum display refresh rate, it can't quite do that for two reasons. First of all, for whatever reason, games just don't seem to run beyond 60Hz on the OnePlus 8 Pro. The only two titles we could confirm that work are Fortnite and PUBG Mobile. These two work because they have specifically been authorized by OnePlus to work. It seems the company just blocks other titles from working over 60Hz. There are multiple titles on the Play Store now that can run as high as 144fps (just check any ASUS ROG phone) but are locked to 60fps or more often than not, just 30fps.

The other issue is overheating, which is likely what causes the previous issue. Unlike some of the gaming-focused smartphones, the OnePlus 8 Pro is not designed to dissipate a lot of heat quickly. This means the phone tends to get fairly warm and that does affect performance after a while as the chipset throttles down. The phone is also physically too warm to use comfortably at this point and will occasionally also throw an overheating message up on the screen. This was something we observed quite often when running Fortnite at the 90Hz refresh rate.

This is not a flaw with the OnePlus 8 Pro as such, nor is it limited to this particular device. It's been sometime now that flagship smartphone chipsets have exceeded the thermal limits of most modern smartphone designs but manufacturers continue to shove them inside thinner phones every year. This means you can't use the hardware to its full potential because sooner rather than later you are going to run into the thermal limitations of the device.

This isn't to say you can't play games on the OnePlus 8 Pro. Most games will run just fine on this phone without causing much in the way of overheating or thermal throttling. But if you are someone into more demanding titles, then you are going to be better off getting a device designed for that use case.