OnePlus Says App Throttling Done to Reduce Power Consumption

OnePlus has responded to the app throttling debacle after its flagship smartphones OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro were delisted from Geekbench. OnePlus was accused of throttling performance of some popular apps and the company explained that it did so to ensure a smooth experience while reducing power consumption. Recently, it was discovered that there were discrepancies in the performance of apps on the OnePlus 9 Pro, and, upon further investigation, it was found that there was a performance-limiting mechanism incorporated on the phone.

For those unaware, it was recently discovered that OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro had discrepancies in the performance of popular apps like those part of Google’s app suite, Microsoft’s Office apps, popular social media apps, and others. Further investigation found that there was a performance-limiting mechanism that detects these apps and prevents them from using the phone’s fastest core, or the ‘prime’ core of the Snapdragon 888 SoC. As a result, the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro were delisted from Geekbench’s Android Benchmark Chart for manipulation.

In its response, OnePlus said that its top priority is to deliver a great user experience with its products and that after the launch of the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro, some users pointed out some areas that could be tweaked to improve battery life and heat management.

“As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimise the devices’ performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app’s processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption,” OnePlus said in its statement.

OnePlus went on to say that its focus is to improve the performance of its devices for the users even if it has a negative impact on the devices’ performance in some benchmarking apps.

App performance being throttled is considered benchmark manipulation as the phone will use all of its cores including the main or prime core when running benchmarks but not when running certain apps. What’s interesting is that while OnePlus has publically accepted this now, it had not mentioned early on that app throttling was something the company was implementing to improve battery life and the user experience.