OnePlus 7- & 7T-series are now marked as EOL (End-of-Life)

They won't receive any further updates. OnePlus has announced that H.36 & F.20 (OOS12; Dec 2022 security patch) are the last builds for these devices.
Adhiraj S. Chauhan

EDITS

Original article and previous edits are preserved below.

2023-02-22 22:45 IST: Global devices have also received H.37/F.20, and links are available for all devices except global OnePlus 7. If you have this device, please reach out to us via email as we have captured a link, but it has some weirdness with its file size. Some of our users confirmed that the official link works without any issues, so we've added it to the app. Still, take precautions like backing up your files etc. EU hasn't received anything beyond H.30/F.17 yet. Also, Indian 7-series devices have received H.38 which is supposed to be the actual final-final-final build (links are in the app already).

This has never happened before, where OnePlus backtracks on their "final build" to keep delivering hotfixes. Initially H.32/F.18 was supposed to be the final build for all regions, but then there were so many issues that they had to roll out H.36/F.20, but then that apparently wasn't enough to fix major issues that people complained about, so Indian 7-series had to receive H.38, or the "final-final-final" build as we call it. Other regions/devices aren't supposed to receive anything beyond H.36/F.20.

One might see this as a good thing, but in our opinion it reflects poorly on their software development team. They've had a lot of time to develop each build, but apparently no testing was done. In fact, OOS12 was initially released as part of the Open Beta track, which was India-only, but it seems they failed to catch any obvious issues like network connectivity and system stability in their "testing".


2023-01-11 09:41 IST: H.33 & F.18 are now available for 7 Pro & 7T respectively. Links for 7 & 7T Pro haven't been captured yet. If you've received it via OTA, please get in touch with us over email or Discord.

2023-01-09 12:04 CET: at the moment of writing, it's only rolling out to Indian variants. We further clarified this in the article.


The unfortunate day has come. In a sneaky edit of the respective community posts (7-series, 7T-series), OnePlus "announced" that these devices will not receive any more updates in the future. H.32 (7-series) & F.18 (7T-series) are the last & final versions. Although OnePlus announced an updated software maintenance schedule in July 2021 — guaranteeing 3 major Android updates and 4 years of security updates to their flagship devices — it did not apply to devices released before 8-series. They instead follow its previous iteration: 2 years of major Android updates and an additional year of only security updates.


Image credit: OnePlus

Recently, they came out with another new commitment: 4 years of major Android updates and 1 more year of security updates (total 5 years). However, that applies only to devices released from 2023 onwards.

OnePlus 7-series launched in May 2019, while 7T-series came later that year in October. The former launched with OxygenOS 9, and the latter came with OOS10 out-of-the-box, meaning that the 7-series actually received 1 more major update compared to the 7T-series (3 vs 2). In any case, it was relatively well known that both sets of these devices were supposed to go EOL by end 2022 or early 2023, in accordance with their software maintenance schedule. What's disappointing though, is how OnePlus chose to deliver such news. Instead of making a new post, so that everyone affected may see it, they decided to sneakily edit an older post about the H.32/F.18 update, and add these lines:

According to the maintenance schedule, MP3 will be the last build for OnePlus 7/7 Pro, thank you all for your help and attention to OnePlus.

According to the maintenance schedule, MP3 will be the last build for OnePlus 7T/7T Pro, thank you all for your help and attention to OnePlus.

We can understand if this information was not communicated by the internal teams to the poster, but at the very least such an important "announcement" should be a pinned comment in those posts. They didn't even bother putting it in a prominent position, or emphasizing it by making it bold/italic. So people who've already seen those posts may not know about this until they go back to those posts for whatever reason, and somehow catch that line.

Also, we're not sure why they're calling it MP3, because it's the second stable OOS12 build, not the third. Here's the changelog for H.32/F.18:

  • System
    • Integrates the December 2022 Android security patch to enhance system security
    • Improves system stability and performance
  • Communication
    • Improves the stability of mobile network connections

ZIPs were added in the app as soon as rollout started, so you don't need to wait to install the last OxygenOS 12 version if you're not already on it. However, at the moment of writing, ZIPs are only available for the Indian variant. OnePlus did not start the rollout yet for EU and global.

This is a sad day for 7- & 7T-series owners, especially because H.32 & F.18 were released in January 2023 with a month-old security patch (Dec 2022). This means that even though it's the last build, you're already missing out on fixes for many critical/high severity vulnerabilities. OnePlus has rarely ever delivered the current month's security patch in their updates, which is dissatisfying for everyone. From a user perspective, nothing good came out of the merger with Oppo after all.

A device being marked EOL (End-of-Life) by its manufacturer doesn't prevent you from using it anymore, as you could always go down the custom ROM route (LineageOS is a great place to start). Note that installing a custom ROM requires unlocking your bootloader , which in turn wipes device data. Regardless, we highly recommend you do so, so that you can continue using your device if the hardware is still functioning properly. Moreover, newer security patches will be made available to you via these custom ROMs.


Sources: 7-series, 7T-series

If you have questions, you can join our Discord server and chat with other members of our community. Keep in mind that this was OnePlus' decision of course, not ours.