OnePlus 9 Pro long-term review

Software

The OnePlus 9 Pro comes with OxygenOS 11. It's the last major version of OxygenOS designed and developed by OnePlus before it gets merged with the Oppo-developed ColorOS in the next version and essentially becomes ColorOS with a different skin.

OxygenOS 11 on the OnePlus 9 Pro has been a major disappointment. While it's easy to be nostalgic about it because of how much of a breath of fresh air it used to be back in the day and how, in many ways, it is still superior to many of its contemporaries, the truth is that in terms of stability OxygenOS has been on a downward trajectory for a while now.

Using the OnePlus 9 Pro has involved constantly running into one software issue after another. In terms of the sheer number of bugs, it seems as if OxygenOS 11 has no equal in the industry. You may have issues with how some of the other Android skins are designed or what features they may have, but few of them are as frustrating to use on a daily basis like this.

One of the issues that frequently keeps popping up is that the media player control notification simply refuses to appear at times. You could be playing audio in your music or podcast player of choice and then go to the lockscreen or notification center to find that there are no controls there to playback. Your option at that point is to go back to the app that's playing audio and then play/pause it a few times for the notification to finally pop up.

The frequency with which this bug appears is simply staggering, to the tune of almost every single time something is played on the phone. The best part is that the bug had existed for a long time from even before the OnePlus 9 series was announced. It appeared sometime last year and has remained unfixed.

There are many such issues that seem to have been around since time immemorial but have gone unnoticed. A lot of these issues aren't big enough for even the user to take notice or be particularly upset about, but when you put them all together, they quickly add up, and the entire experience starts feeling like death by a thousand cuts.

For our part, we have always communicated our issues and grievances with OnePlus whenever we have come across them. To their credit, the PR team has always been very receptive to any feedback or criticism that we have sent their way. Unfortunately, as the information moves further up the chain, it tends to get lost somewhere along the way, and we neither hear about any action being taken nor do we see any of the issues we brought up being addressed.

The thing that saddens us the most is that OxygenOS 11 is still worlds better than many of its rivals in basic things like aesthetics, consistency, and striking the right balance between adding features and just throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks.

However, there are just too many bugs and issues throughout the software that damage the user experience and makes it hard to recommend it to the average user.

As for the upcoming switch to the ColorOS codebase, it feels at this point, things can only go up for OxygenOS. One of the things OnePlus has promised with the switch to the new software is improved stability, and OxygenOS is desperately in need of some right now.

However, it's also easy to be cynical about how the merger will also change OxygenOS for the worse aesthetically and functionally. While ColorOS is better than it used to be, many users would still prefer the way OxygenOS looks and works right now, and the improved stability might not be enough of an incentive if the OS just looks and works fundamentally different than what users have come to expect from OxygenOS.

We already saw this when we checked out the OnePlus Nord 2. It was the first phone to run on the new ColorOS codebase while still running on OxygenOS 11. That software, for all intents and purposes, is ColorOS once you look past the launcher and other basic UI elements, and that rubbed some people the wrong way.

Hopefully, with OxygenOS 12, OnePlus is able to strike the right balance between aesthetics, functionality, and stability.

Performance

The OnePlus 9 Pro runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 platform and is still pretty much one of the most powerful phones on the market right now. OnePlus has never been the one to hold back in terms of storage and memory, and so the phone has plenty of those, as well.

In terms of outright performance, the OnePlus 9 Pro is excellent. It's funny how quickly you get used to it, though. Still, even if you go down one or two steps down the performance ladder, the difference is often very easy to notice. Suddenly you have an even greater appreciation for what the flagship phones bring to the table.

However, despite all that power, the OnePlus 9 Pro remains a mediocre gaming phone. OnePlus continues to hamstring its phones by capping the display refresh rate to 60Hz in games. Only a handful of games are allowed to breach this limit, and even those can only go up to 90Hz, not the display's full 120Hz.

This does put a dampener on the overall gaming experience. Gaming is something that benefits the most from having a higher frame rate as it cuts down on the input latency and improves your reaction times. Having most games being limited to just 60Hz makes the OnePlus 9 Pro feel no better than a mid-range smartphone that can also achieve the same level of performance.

OnePlus also does other weird things with the refresh rate, such as locking it to 60Hz in the YouTube app. This makes the YouTube UI choppy, and the video has judder due to uneven frame pacing. A better solution would have been to have the full 120Hz in the UI and variable refresh rate while playing video. This is something other manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi already do, so it's not clear why OnePlus refuses to.