OnePlus has confirmed that it deliberately reduces performance in “many of the most popular apps” in order to improve battery life on its latest OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro phones. The issue arose following testing by Anandtech’s Andrei Frumusanu, who called the situation “rather baffling” after discovering slowdown in a wide range of prominent apps from Google’s Play Store.
Anandtech’s conclusion is that OnePlus is “blacklisting popular applications away from its fastest cores, causing slowdown in typical workloads such as web browsing.” The site tested Chrome and Twitter performance extensively, but concluded that the slowdown “applies to pretty much everything that has any level of popularity in the Play Store.”
