OnePlus and OPPO will merge even more company components

Both companies will continue to operate separately
Anonymoussaurus

UPDATES

2021/06/22 19:28 GMT:

An Indian journalist named Abhishek Baxi tweeted today that the General Manager (Vikas Agarwal) of OnePlus India has left the company. Agarwal likely left due to the recent announcement of OnePlus and OPPO going to merge. The manager has worked at OnePlus since 2014.


If you didn't know that both OnePlus and OPPO have BBK Electronics as parent company, then you might have noticed that some OnePlus and OPPO phones can look very similar. For example, the OnePlus 5 and OPPO R12S look very much the same. So do the OnePlus Nord N100 and OPPO A53. It's the same with charging techniques; OnePlus Warp Charge is basically OPPO (Super) VOOC. In January 2021, OnePlus confirmed that they've merged R&D forces within the OPLUS group. New employees regarding R&D are now hired by OPPO as well instead of by OnePlus.

Last week Pete Lau, OnePlus' CEO, made an announcement on the OnePlus Forums. He said that "after seeing positive impact from those changes, we’ve decided to further integrate our organization with OPPO." Lau said that he's confident that this change will have a positive outcome for the community and their users. The CEO also claimed it will allow OnePlus "to be more efficient, for example, bringing faster and more stable software updates for OnePlus users." Even though this may seem to imply that OnePlus phones may use ColorOS (which is what OPPO uses for their phones, and what OnePlus uses for the 9-series and onwards in China, instead of HydrogenOS), Pete Lau said that OxygenOS will remain the operating system for global OnePlus devices outside of the Chinese market. He confirmed that both companies will continue to operate independently.

Two days later after Pete's announcement, Evan Blass (evleaks) showed an internal memo about the relationship of OnePlus and OPPO. In this note, which you can review below, some interesting things are being mentioned: OnePlus will continue storing user data on their own servers, instead of OPPO's. The biggest change is that OnePlus will now be part of OPPO, while before it was just a sister company under BBK Electronics' umbrella. OnePlus already started the merge of R&D in December 2020, and the entire merge process will take until the end of this year.



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