OnePlus EXPOSED! Caught By GeekBench Throttling Phones! By TechOdyssey

Hey everybody welcome back to tech odyssey, so today, I'm here to talk about something, that's kind of important and relevant in the OnePlus world. So it has come to light by geek bench and bless those guys over there. They do some great work, all the behind the scenes, stuff testing out all different, chipsets and phones to let us know you know what their benchmark scores and how well they're actually performing well. It has come to light in their testing that OnePlus is throttling the OnePlus, 9 and OnePlus 9 pro, which both have the snapdragon 8 and lowering the performance on certain apps to improve battery life, and this is really problematic, and you're probably going to see a lot of this over the next day or two. This is really an emerging topic that came out, so I thought I'd go ahead and well you're my audience, so I thought I'd go ahead and talk to you guys about it and tell you because I'm sure plenty of you out there are using an OnePlus phone right now from what we know. It's limited to the OnePlus, 9 and 9 pro, but geek bench is going to test other OnePlus devices as well, so to set the tone for this video we're going to set the mood lighting, we'll change it to red for bad red for evil, and you know maybe they're evil, or maybe they're not.

But we want to talk about this, and I'm going to explain what is happening, what they're doing how it works- and you know maybe talk about whether we should be concerned about this, because it's a very troubling thing. It's really a big deal when a company goes out and alters the performance of their hardware on something that's been sold and tested and marketed as one thing, and then you find out that they're doing things on the back end that you don't know about, so we're going to dive in and talk about this. But before we do, I do want to say if this is your first time stopping by the channel. Thank you for being here. If you enjoy the video, please hit the like, and the subscribe button and little notification bell.

If you want updates, when new videos come out now, let's talk about the OnePlus shenanigans, so I hopped onto twitter this evening, as I do, and I was looking around and seeing all these comments on OnePlus and OnePlus shenanigans things OnePlus are doing. OnePlus you know can't be trusted all the good stuff. What happened is that it was discovered that they were throttling apps up to about 300 different popular apps, to include google, chrome and some other ones, and what happened was geek bench went through, and they were testing all these different flagship phones and realized that certain apps were behaving differently on the OnePlus, 9 and OnePlus 9 pro again, we don't know if this extends to other ones yet, but what they're doing is they're throttling them, and you might be wondering what throttling is well socs systems on a chip cpu, whatever you want to call them, they have certain processor speeds, so that means that they're supposed to perform in a given way. They are designed to power through the apps and run them so that you can use them properly. There is an expectation based off of how the phone runs, how well the app is supposed to run.

So if you look at the snapdragon 8 processors, it's got a very, very fast overall clock speed. But when you talk about the processor, it has eight different cores, and it has the primary cores. It has the multitasking cores, and they're rated at different speeds. So the main core is about three gigahertz, which is a lot. That's really fast.

Well, normally, when you're doing tasks you're doing a lot of heavy stuff, then yes, the primary core is the one that handles the heavy lifting, and it is the primary core. It's the one that runs everything faster. So what they're doing is they're diverting these apps and instead of running on the faster higher clock, speed, cores, they're running on the lower ones and in their testing it was determined that the chrome app is actually running slower than on a Google Pixel 5, which is running a snapdragon 765, there's a big difference between a snapdragon 8 and a snapdragon 765, and the expectation there. If you get a Samsung phone, if you get a Realme phone, if you get any other phone out there running a snapdragon 8, it should really be running about the same speed across the board, because that's how the app is programmed to run to exploit the hardware so that it can run it at its best possible speed. Well, it's not stranger that the snapdragon 8 has issues it's it overheats, it's really hot! It gets real.

I mean it's fast, it's a supercharged superfast processor. So that's what happens and when you have these triple h, you have these other flagship processors in phones. Well, there's not a lot of heat radiation going on there. There's, not any fans going on that are offloading that heat, so it doesn't build up. It degrades the battery performance and, of course, when you're running apps on high clock speeds, then yes, it's going to eat up the battery faster, so OnePlus actually put out an official statement.

I'll have to read this because I can't remember all of it, but geek bench put something out, and they said we have detected that OnePlus is blacklisting popular applications away from its fastest cores, causing slowdown in typical workloads such as web browsing. We have confirmed that benchmarks or unknown apps get full performance, but most of the popular non-benchmark apps get notably reduced performance. This is perhaps to improve battery life at the expense of performance, and it does not mean the regular benchmarks. Results are somewhat useless for user experience, so this is kind of a spoofing thing. It seems like something that has been done intentionally to throw off the guys who test these things and also give people a false sense of what they're actually getting with their phone see when you buy something you expect it to work as it's intended.

You expect it to work as it's been advertised. This is especially problematic because it's not like this was done from the get-go for all apps. It was only done after the fact, and it was only done to certain apps, so the day-to-day apps that you're using the ones that we're talking about here, chrome and some other ones, then yeah you're going to get a reduced performance there, whereas when they first put the phone out it wasn't this way, so they put the phone out there. They let it run at full blast, it gets tested, it gets evaluated, it gets reviewed and everybody says this is what you get with this phone. This is what you expect, and then you come to find out later on: hey they messed it up.

They throttled it, and now Google Chrome is running slower than a three four hundred dollar budget phone from last year. Well, you're! Not paying for that. That's not the expectation you have when you get this phone, so I'm glad that geek bench tested this stuff out, they've delisted them they've, taken them off their platform for right now, and they're going to go test other phones to see if it happened with any other ones. Right now it's limited to the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 pro, and it's very frustrating, because when you look at it, and you get any sort of flagship phone, it's got a snapdragon 8 these s21 ultra. You look at the OnePlus phones.

You look at also like the realm device. Furthermore, you look at the Xiaomi phones. It is a very widely available processor in these phones, and you should expect that it's going to run as intended, but OnePlus has altered this and, on the back end, they've changed the coding on your phone to lower the performance on them to use slower processor cores on your chip to lower the performance. So that way it can save on the battery life. So your phone will last longer and some people might be saying.

Well, I'm okay with that, because I don't notice a difference and my phone still runs fine and that may very well be true. You may not want to get rid of your phone. You may love your phone just as much, but it's an integrity issue, because if they're doing this with the chip, what else could they be doing? It with what have they done with it that other people haven't found out about yet and that's a troubling thing, because OnePlus really hasn't been in the U. S. that long they've been trying to establish and build their brand here, they're trying to build a level of trust and then something like this happens.

It's very, very troublesome, so OnePlus actually did address this. They actually put out a formal statement. I have to read this because I can't remember all this but here's the statement, so our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 pro in March, some users told us about some areas which we could improve: the device's battery life and heat management. That's been a big problem.

I've been talking about this. I talked about it with the OnePlus 9 9 pro talked about it with the galaxy s21 ultra, it's a problem. So, as a result of this feedback, our r d team has been working over the past few months to optimize the device's performance when using 300 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. While this may impact the device's performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus has always is to do what we can improve to improve the performance of the device for our users.

So looking at it, maybe you haven't noticed a difference, and if you have then this is what's happened in the recent updates. They've addressed things and actually made a software update video back in April saying they had found a way to increase battery performance dealing with heat mitigation, heat management. I didn't think it was this, and maybe it wasn't back in April. Maybe they just did this in May or June. This was just now discovered, so we don't know how long this has been going on, and maybe it has an impact you mean if they told you what was going on.

That would be one thing: they said: hey we're going to include an option in here. That's going to run these at lower processor speed, so we can save your battery life. Most people would probably be okay with that what people aren't okay with and what I'm not okay with, is when the company unilaterally decides how you should use your phone, how your phone is going to run after it's been sold to you, and you have no safe zone, you don't know what's going on and then all of a sudden they're slowing down the performance on your apps. So that's a very troubling thing: I'm glad they owned up to it. I'm glad they admitted that they're doing it.

I'm glad that geek bench found this out, but at the end of the day this raises a red flag, and when I was in the military there was a saying it says: never compromise your integrity. Well, when you compromise your integrity, and you do something like this- it raises into question other things. You know: what else are they doing? What else have they done? What might be done in the future? How much do we have to go back and check and verify this stuff, because it's not an across-the-board thing, it's only certain apps, and they left out the ones that are used for benchmark testing. So the guys who check this stuff, the watchmen, can tell you how it's running, how it stacks up against the competition. So on paper they tried to make it look like it runs just as well as the other ones.

But then, when you run something like Google Chrome, it's running slower than a mid-tier phone from 2020 last year, so we can all formulate our own opinions. I'm not going to tell you how to think. I'm not going to tell you how to feel I'm not going to tell you to go, get rid of your OnePlus 9 phones. Furthermore, I love the OnePlus 9 pro. Furthermore, I use them both extensively.

Furthermore, I covered them both, and I think that they're fantastic devices, but this right here puts a question mark. It puts an asterisk next to it, it's like the guys who played baseball, and they got popped for steroids, and then they put an asterisk next to their stuff. Like you know, Barry bonds and his home run title, and once you get an asterisk next to your name, it's very hard to get that off, and hopefully they can come clean with all this stuff. They can re-evaluate their practices, and cannot do this stuff because it's its bad, it's troubling. It's like buying something, and it's advertised as one thing and then after you get it yeah it's there, but it doesn't actually run the way that it's supposed to.

So I wanted to talk about this. I wanted to bring this to you all. It's like breaking emerging news. It just happened. I think today uh or yesterday, because you're seeing this the next day.

So that's my thoughts on it. What do you think about it? Sounds off in the comments section? Are you happy? Are you mad again? We don't know how far this extends, because we don't know yet so geek bench said they're going to go test out. Other OnePlus devices, I'm sure we'll find in the very near future if this is impacting other OnePlus phones but yeah. This is not a good look, and I'm glad that we, we called shenanigans on this one. So that's all I've got in this video.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them down in the comment section I'll get back with you. If you enjoy the video please hit the like and the subscribe button and little notification bell if you want updates when new videos come out and as always thanks for being here, I appreciate you watching, and I'll see you guys next time you.

Source : TechOdyssey