About the option to 'make the app better'

You may have noticed it - or perhaps not yet. But i'd like to share some details about our most recent feature addition: Helping making the app better.

This is a feature which you can opt-int to (i.e. agree to start doing so). You may wonder what you'll exactly be 'making better', but i'll also cover why it's good so many of you already opted in and why people with some devices should consider opting in.

What's this all about?

As of late 2018, the app relies on volunteers who submit data of new updates to its database. This is a demanding process, as it's hard to find the download links of new updates until they're already available to a lot of people. And if they already are - chances are many of you will already have updated outside this app, either using the regular update mechanism or by searching on forums yourself. To make things worse, OnePlus has released regional variants of the OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro. These "EU" versions have different software than their international counterparts, so there's twice as much of work to do.

Shortly said, to make Oxygen Updater worthful and having it offer new OxygenOS updates as fast as it always udid, it's crucial to provide new OxygenOS updates as fast as possible.

To do so, the 'make the app better' feature submits names of update files present (or being downloaded) on your phone to our server. If these files are new, our volunteers will get a notification so they can start adding the new update to the app. Please note that only the names of the files are sent to the server, not the contents of the files itself. Also, you can opt-out at any time from the settings of the app.

A lot of you are already helping, but we need you!

I am glad to see how many of you have opted in to help. Thanks for doing so!

If you're not helping yet, you can opt-in by going to the settings of the app and tapping the Contribute button, then ticking the box in the pop-up window that opens and pressing save.

Below, you'll see some stats on how many have opted in. Please note that opt-outs at a later stage are not removed from these, so the actual number of users will be slightly lower.

Stats powered by Google Analytics. Timespan: From feature launch to June 29th, 2019.

We can see some interesting things when looking at these numbers.

• The OnePlus 6 is extremely popular. Even more than the OnePlus 6T! 
• The OnePlus 3, 3T, 5 and 5T are also very popular. The T's slightly more than their non-T counterparts
• The new OnePlus 7 Pro is getting increasingly more popular, which is a good thing given how many updates it is currently getting
• The non-pro OnePlus 7 is not very popular. That is a bit worrysome, as it takes longer for new updates to appear to our volunteers. Even with 338 devices opted in, only a very small set of devices will be in the first batch to receive an official update, which is required to make a succesful submission (about 1%). That's only about 3-4 phones each time! How the EU version can be below the 5-year old OnePlus One is still a mistery to me ...
• The OnePlus 7 Pro 5G edition is not very popular, but that was to be expected. It is only sold through 2 carriers in 2 countries, so there are not many of them in the wild.
• Legacy devices like the OnePlus X and OnePlus One are not very popular, but these will not be getting new updates so that's not a problem

Wrapping it up

Again: many thanks for helping us if you've opted in. If you haven't yet, and you are (or a friend is) using Oxygen Updater on a non-pro OP7, please sign up today ;)

If using another device, you're always welcome to help as well. Cheers!

~Arjan