Downfall of OnePlus

got an article on my timeline this week that had the headline that said exclusive OnePlus is being dismantled. And I said, “Oh, that’s big news.” So, I read the whole article. Turned out there is no exclusive information. And it was mostly just a bunch of speculation about why the brand might have to shut down at some point. And also, it reads a lot like it was written by Chad GPT. I’m not even going to link to it. But either way, it got me thinking a lot more about the arc of OnePlus.

There is a pretty timeless video. It’s like 8 years old now from Tech Alter about why enthusiast brands will always betray you. I will link that one below. It is crazy how evergreen that video is because so many companies keep following that arc of starting off as an enthusiast focused company and then eventually turning. And the thing is, they don’t all survive it. Like many companies die on the leap from being a successful enthusiast company to hopefully someday becoming a mass appeal brand. Lots of them don’t make it. You might remember Nextit or Essential or even Asus who had two different enthusiast hits. But OnePlus, well, OnePlus is still alive here in 2026. They’ve now done the whole arc from start to finish. And so they’ve sort of accidentally become the blueprint for survival as an enthusiast brand. And betrayal is a part of that blueprint. So let me explain.

So if there’s one thing that we all know has been true forever, it’s that breaking into the US smartphone market is basically impossible. Like it’s been this duopoly for as long as time has existed. It feels like it’s Samsung and Apple. And in 2014, it was also Samsung and Apple. And then, you know, LG and HTC and Motorola kind of fighting over the last few scraps of the last couple percent. And then this came out, the OnePlus 1. You remember this? Like, some of you were around for these good old days, but for those of you who are too young to remember, let me fill you in.

The hype for this phone was absolutely nuts before it even started shipping. It had all these flagship specs with the latest gen Snapdragon 800 series chip and it was $300 somehow which was unreal. Had this pretty clean design with this little new sandstone thing going on and then it had this clean software. It was running cyanogen mod. So this developer friendly clean no bloatware experience. It was just it was a breath of fresh air. They called it the flagship killer cuz why would anyone spend the $600 $700 on the Apple or Samsung flagships anymore when you can get this? At least that’s what the enthusiast mindset was.

But of course, the enthusiast was also the only one who was going to find the OnePlus 1. You know, searching online for new smartphones. And actually buying one, you needed an invite to buy one. They had this whole system. It was crazy hard to get. But despite all of that, they still sold over a million of these things. And they were immediately on the map. It was just right recipe, right time. It looked genius. But of course, now they have a dilemma on their hands because they’ve captured the hearts of the exact worst customer group imaginable, the enthusiast. You know, it’s exciting because they’re the most hype right now, but they’re also the most picky. They have the highest standards and they’re somehow the least loyal because, you know, if something else pops up with slightly better specs, then they’ll just leave and go buy that instead. And it’s the smallest group of people relative to the population. See that group right there? That’s who you just got the attention of. the enthusiast, the early adopter, but there’s this whole rest of the smartphone buying public who still doesn’t even really know you exist yet. This is not sustainable, but it’s a hell of a start.

I’ve said many times, the second generation of anything tells you the most about it because that’s where you see what the company learned and what they’re going to do about it. And that’s when you first see them like pick a direction and start chasing something. So, with the first OnePlus phone, they made a lot of choices, a lot of the right tradeoffs to nail these things that enthusiasts were after. Like, they made the active choice to leave out things that other mainstream phones had, like an official IP rating or even doing any advertising because this would all save money that would be passed down to the end user. And tech heads, including me, we raved about this. We loved it. We ate it up.

So, with the OnePlus 2, you can almost see them being terrified not to mess this up. They kept a lot of the same stuff, same design. They did a couple standard spec bumps and they bumped the price up just a tiny bit to $330. But they also decided to make this thing called the OnePlus X and it was a little weird. It was not a flagship phone. It was also not really an enthusiast phone. It was a $250 mid-range kind of designer type of phone. They had a special ceramic limited edition that they also made. The non-ceramic one. It was it was a good price. It just wasn’t something that enthusiasts were really interested in at all. It’s just a little wobble in their otherwise pretty focused flagship killer mentality.

So, the OnePlus 3 and 3T were very much back to being enthusiast phones. Super high-end specs, rapid iteration, lots of interesting cool features. They were back on track. You just can’t forget about that little wobble.

So, if you ask someone who’s been around long enough, what was Peak OnePlus like? they’d probably say somewhere around the OnePlus 5 and the OnePlus 6 and they were on top of the world by the OnePlus 7 series. They’d iterated on the design quite a bit with thinner and thinner bezels and fingerprint readers and bigger batteries and much faster charging. And they’d obviously moved on from Cyanogen Mod, but now they had their own flavor of Android Oxygen OS, which was this super smooth and fast optimized software. They had a software team that had come into their own tweaking all kinds of animations and timing and making these phones as responsive as possible.

By this point, basically anyone who reviews phones or says anything about phones at all was basically on the same page that these were the best bang for the buck in the entire industry. They’d blown past like if you know you know status and it was literally like if anyone is a smartphone reviewer or has a tech blog or weighs in about smartphones at all, everyone was like, “Yeah, these are some of the best smartphones.” And you can even see it in the titles of my reviews back then. The OnePlus 6 was right on the money. The OnePlus 7 was under the radar. The OnePlus 7 Pro was silly fast and the 7T Pro was tiny tweaks to excellence.

I think my favorite OnePlus phone of all time would be the OnePlus 7T Pro. That thing that that is a phone I genuinely believe I could still use today and be totally happy with. between the really modern design, the super clean software, the ridiculously responsive performance, the really fast charging, even the pop-up selfie camera, and it was 660 bucks. I just I remember so clearly I loved that thing.

But even at this point, the masses are still not really buying these phones. And don’t get me wrong, they’re very successful, but with a niche, small audience, the early adopters, the people who will watch MKBHD smartphone reviews and then maybe pre-order one online. But most people are not doing that. Most people are right here buying phones in carrier stores every three to four years, buying the safe option that’s, you know, pretty similar to their last option. And so if OnePlus could find a way to get from here to here, then they could finally do it. They could finally be the new company that comes along and actually breaks apart the duopoly basically that’s been selling all the phones in the US the whole time, Samsung and Apple every year.

Or or they could be competitive in new markets and and jump into India where that’s super fast growth and they could actually scale up and be a big player from nothing. Maybe a carrier deal in the US will do the trick or maybe a few commercials here and there. But be careful. Careful. Don’t mess this up. The enthusiasts still like you.

So here’s the problem. You have won over the enthusiasts. It is like they all love you right now, but they are still the absolute worst group to be your prime customer base. They are the smallest group and they are the most fickle. They have the highest standards and they are the least loyal. This isn’t sustainable. So, you need to leverage this success over here to get to the masses, the less picky, more casual brand loyal large audience to actually scale up.

But the thing that won over those enthusiasts is the exact opposite of what the masses want. Like all this cost cutting and spec maxing and customization and optimization you’ve been doing for the enthusiast, it’s great. We eat that stuff up. Making the phone waterproof, but skipping the official IP rating to save a few bucks and pass those savings down to the customer. Legendary. Not really running any commercials or doing any carrier deals and selling phones directly to consumers for lower prices. Perfect.

But the masses do not really reward this type of behavior with their dollars at all. In fact, they want the safe option that does have the IP rating, the one that is on the shelf of the carrier store. So, if you want to offer something that the masses actually want, that will be the exact something that drives the enthusiasts away. And every enthusiast brand, every single one has this realization at some point.

Some tried to make the transition smoothly and gracefully like Asus with the ROG phone. Like the early ROG phones were hardware focused gaming enthusiast phones with extra high refresh rates and all of the gaming features and design. And then they slowly neutered it little by little and toned it down and had a less aggressive design and softened the edges and made room for more mainstream features like wireless charging and that failed. Now the ROG phone is dead.

You might also remember the Zen phone which again from Asus they they tried not so smoothly. They actually tried to just jump. So they had a mega enthusiast hit on their hands with the Xen Phone 9 and the Xen Phone 10. And once again, everyone who reviewed these phones loved them. But guess what? The masses don’t buy small phones. They want big screens pretty simply. So they tried this quick pivot with a huge Xen Phone 11 Ultra. And well, you can see how terribly those things went pretty predictably.

The mission is it’s so tricky. If you want to successfully make this jump, you have to aggressively build this new audience. And you have to somehow do it faster than you lose your old one.

This is my title for the OnePlus 8 review special no more. And then these are my titles for the OnePlus 10 Pro and 10T videos.

Yeah, OnePlus has somehow pulled off the most successful but also least successful jump from from enthusiast to mainstream that we’ve ever seen. Like they actually tried a bunch of things. They they tried slowly adopting some of these mass market things like switching to the all glass designs instead of the metal backs. They added official IP ratings eventually for waterproofing. They’d also continued to turn up the price with each new phone, like slowly turning up the temperature on a stove. These are now $900 phones.

So, they also added a budget line called the OnePlus Nord and started making a bunch of phones that were less expensive. So, they could keep selling their super expensive phones, but then they would also at least offer something that’s less expensive, but it’s more of like a mid-range phone. They also started making carrier deals in the US, so they could start selling phones to the masses that buy in stores, and that’s a different business model. And obviously, these are more expensive phones to make up for that, but it’s a lot going on.

This is also around the time that the co-founder Carl Pay left the company. They struck a partnership with Hasselblad starting with the OnePlus 9 series in an effort to give people confidence about their cameras, which are very important to mainstream buyers. By the OnePlus 10, they’d almost completely lost their identity from before. They’re dropping phones at this point that very closely resemble their cousin company, Oppo’s phones, more than ever.

So, peak OnePlus for us enthusiasts was like OnePlus 6, OnePlus 7. I think if you ask OnePlus peak for their books was probably like OnePlus 10 when they had like a whole big product lineup going on, but also none of it really stood out anymore. Like they had parts of their identity still like the fast charging they never got rid of that. Um and their software Oxygen OS though even that pretty quickly started fading to resemble Oppo’s color OS which isn’t bad. It’s just fine really.

So, we are all the way at OnePlus 15 now, which solid phone. I’ve been dailing it for a couple months. Still really smooth, great battery life, really fast charging, still, you know, pretty generic looking design. Cameras aren’t that good, but it’s fine. But the enthusiast has long moved on. There was Pocophones and Sony Xperia phones and nothing phones and all sorts of stuff in between. But now this is one of those phones that we can recommend more to everyday people. So success technically barely.

So I say the downfall of OnePlus will be studied because they are still alive. Like that much is true about this company was like the OnePlus 1. This was the ultimate pure enthusiast phone and they’ve done the whole arc now all the way till what they are today. Still alive. got to give them credit for that. So, if you’re another enthusiast brand, this is at least a path for what it can look like to survive going from that to mainstream appeal and the very very deliberate slowly peeling back of the enthusiast edges and the softening of things up and not losing the enthusiast too fast and appealing more to the mainstream audience.

Ironically, it seems like Carl is speedr runninging the same process with nothing as a company, but that’s another story for another day.