OnePlus doesn’t want this new Android standard – and it has made the OnePlus 12 even more affordable
Keeping your phone until it dies has become a lot harder lately, right? Hardware has reached a point in recent years where, for once, you’re more likely to get bored with your phone long before you kill it, and phone companies are starting to catch on to this admittedly positive skid.
That is, unless you’re OnePlus. The relatively recent phone launches from Samsung and Google have introduced seven years of Android updates to the flagship standard. But OnePlus is not quite on board yet. The OnePlus 12 launched with support for just four years of major Android updates, but contrary to what you might think, this could actually be a good thing.
Sticking to its roots
Since its inception, OnePlus has consistently followed the line of high performance without a high price. Although its prices have risen over the years, it still produces phones that can beat the best Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, all without a bank-breaking price. The OnePlus 12 continues this trend, and from what I can see, this makes it all the more compelling.
OnePlus loyalists will often brag about their phone’s ability to match or even surpass the quality of its competitors from Samsung and Google, not to mention the iPhone. It’s this almost cult-like drive for superiority that makes OnePlus’ call for a shorter OnePlus 12 lifespan perhaps one of its best decisions yet.
See, with longevity comes great boredom, to poorly rephrase an iconic quote. While this isn’t necessarily true for all phone users, it is certainly true for phone enthusiasts, which OnePlus users tend to be. The data backs this up too: in a UK survey by YouGov, 62% of people said they expect to use a phone for only four years. In the US, Statista data shows that people change phones every two to three years on average, and this isn’t just OnePlus enthusiasts, this is everyone.
So why would people need seven years of Android updates? Sure, it will serve those who simply choose not to change their phone until it’s broken in a way that the OnePlus 12 won’t, but is that the majority at this point? I do not think so.
Finding opportunities
As always, there is a small but malleable gap in the smartphone market that OnePlus has cleverly woven itself into. The OnePlus 12 takes the best of some of its main rivals, like the Galaxy S24 Ultra and Xiaomi 14, and reworks them into their own in a way that would probably make you want to spend four years with it, instead of spending four would like to spend years with. to ensure you get value for money.
The OnePlus 12 is equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 as standard, something that is not the case for the Samsung Galaxy S24 worldwide. It has created a camera system in collaboration with Hasselblad to create an improved, yet recognizable OnePlus snapper suite, just like Xiaomi has done with Leica and it surpasses them both in terms of battery size and charging speeds. That’s before you even consider the OnePlus 12’s advanced cooling technology and battery maintenance engine, which keeps it at peak performance for longer.
Of course, as you’d expect, the OnePlus 12 does all of this, and it’s still arguably great value. The base model with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage of the OnePlus 12 costs £849 / $799.99, while the Samsung Galaxy S24 with just 8GB RAM and 128GB storage costs £799 / $799. So for just £50 more (or absolutely no difference if you live in the US) you can get more RAM, more storage and specs that match or exceed the phone that is supposedly the best phone of the moment. So fundamentally: why not go for OnePlus?
Look forward to something
Don’t get me wrong: seven years of updates is huge. If you can’t afford a new phone, that number of Android updates means there’s all the more reason to look at the refurbished phone market. It will increase the resale value of old devices, which will not only improve your bank balance, but also give people fewer reasons to just throw away their old phones, reducing electronic waste.
Okay, now that the environmental part is mentioned, from a phone point of view there is a definite other side for die-hard phone enthusiasts, because fundamentally, seven years is a very long time in the tech world right now.
At the moment, developments in phones are gaining momentum again, partly due to advances in AI, yes, but also simply due to the sheer number of improvements we’re seeing in both the hardware and software that devices use . Seven years will leave you far behind the rest, with a phone that may be on its last legs, and a phone bill that will have seen one – or perhaps six – too many price increases every year. And no one wants that, especially not the real phone enthusiasts; However, four years might be the right place.