Oxygen Updater in 2021

This article was written on 31st December, 2020. All analytical data like install counts, active users, etc. are calculated using Google Play's statistics for this app. This article will not be updated with newer counts, as it's meant to reflect the state of the app on 31st December, 2020.

Hi folks,

It's 2021! For the sake of complete transparency, we've been writing such articles since 2018, and wanted to share an overview of the past year and highlight how Oxygen Updater will be at your service in 2021. If you'd like to view last year's new year article, click here.

Looking back at 2020

We had been working on a major design overhaul, and finally released the v5.0.0 redesign in December 2020. So far, ~86.5% of our users are on this latest version, and feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We have some more quality-of-life improvements that should roll out in by the next week (e.g. massively improved translations for German & Russian, plus a few other things).

If you've been following this project closely, you'd remember that 2019 was the year when Arjan Vlek transferred ownership to a new team of developers, being lead by me (the transfer happened in mid-August). While we initially had a few other developers in the team, they've all since left, as balancing personal lives became challenging. If you'd like to join our team, shoot us an email. Nevertheless, the project has been doing very well since then — here are some growth comparison metrics for 2020:

January 2019 - January 2020: 269,306 active users to 346,713. That means in 1 year, we grew our userbase by 77,407.

This wouldn't have been possible without you, our trusted users. Thank you so much for believing in Oxygen Updater, and having unwavering confidence in the new team. We're thinking about exciting ways to give back to our community. Stay tuned for that!

Here's a screenshot of the current total installs, you can clearly see the immense growth after 09/2020:

Based on past metrics, we usually see a spike around October/November, likely due to the launch of new OnePlus devices and new Android version releases. The app is used a lot, almost every moment someone is opening or refreshing the app.

OxygenOS devices & updates

During 2020, we quickly added support for all the newest OnePlus devices, and numerous updates were released & made available in the app. We've been helping our users navigate their way through OnePlus' absolute mess of OTA rollouts, most notably the 8-series OB3 data wipe fiasco (TLDR: OnePlus mistakenly rolled out a stable build to users on Open Beta, which lead to a full data wipe). Our team worked round the clock to offer support to disgruntled users, to help them solve issues, including rolling back to older OxygenOS versions.

Every year we hope OnePlus doesn't make such mistakes again, but every year there's something new. After all, they're yet to release the Android 11 update for 7-series, 7T-series, and 6/6T devices. We had information that they were planning to release OOS11 via Open Beta to both 7T- and 7-series devices in November, but that was delayed (the linked source is related to H2OS, but it's usually a good indicator for OOS timelines) in December 2020. Closed Beta is currently under testing, so we should hopefully see an Open Beta build by the end of this month.

Contributor statistics

Since 2018, the app has relied on our contributors to submit filenames to our team, as well as the Discord users who've taken time out of their lives to add update data manually, so that all our users can benefit. During the last part of 2018, when Arjan was still maintaining this project, we had some tougher moments, as the app became unable to automatically import updates due to a change on OnePlus' side. For a short while, the future of the app seemed to be uncertain, but with the help of the community everything was back to normal.

Here's the number of users who've opted in to send update file names to our admins:

Looking forward to 2021

After our first major redesign release, we've been focused on vastly improving our internal tools as well as give our website a much-needed design update — the current website has been mostly unchanged since inception, which is around 2017/2018, and it really shows. We're also thinking expanding our articles to the web as well, because right now we're only reaching mobile users. This has been requested by some of our partners in the media as well, since they often link to our articles as sources.

The focus will be on continued growth and active development, as well as planning exciting things for the community. We'll announce these exciting things on our Discord server, and we'll also release a news post so that users who aren't on Discord don't miss out.

Some other tidbits:

• The Oxygen Updater server, domain name & infrastructure is paid by revenue we receive from Play Store IAPs (thank you to all our users who purchased the ad-free version!), as well as ad revenue. While we make use of the funds we've received so far, if you feel like donating to us, you can use this Patreon link.
• Cyanogen Update Tracker, the predecessor of this app which did the same for Cyanogen OS devices, was supposed to be shut down in July 2019, but we decided to keep it around until August 2020. However, I had enabled a yearly auto-renew for this server and forgot to cancel it in time. This means that it will be active until September 2021, giving our users enough time to buy a new device. We'll probably shut it down after that, depending on usage of its platform & website.
  • A shutdown of Cyanogen Update Tracker does not affect Oxygen Updater at all.
  • If you (or anyone you know) still use a Cyanogen OS device on an old OS version, tell them to use Cyanogen Update Tracker to update it NOW.
  • Cyanogen devices include the OnePlus One, most Wileyfox'es, some YU's and some other older phones. See https://cyanogenupdatetracker.com for a complete list of supported devices.

Wrapping it up

We hope you've enjoyed using Oxygen Updater so far. We wish you a Happy New Year! Cheers to a bright future in 2021 & beyond, and stay safe!