The OnePlus 6 is one of my favorite phones from 2018 to revisit. The last offering from OnePlus with a rear fingerprint sensor and a headphone jack, this phone STRONGLY tested my theory on waiting for the “T” version.

The OnePlus 6T was an exciting phone. It came in a gorgeous purple shell. It got a carrier deal with T-Mobile. However, the farther we get from 2018, the OnePlus 6 is the phone I hold closer for its practicality.

Over a year from its initial launch, how well is OnePlus keeping up with support for the 6? Pretty stinking well…

Which shouldn’t come as any great surprise. OnePlus has built and maintained a solid reputation for software support. There’s now an expectation. Not only will your phone get a solid couple years of support, but those full OS updates will come relatively quickly.

The OP6/6T series of phones landed the Android 10 update in a comfortable window, just outside the fastest updates delivered for phones released in 2019. The original estimate was for a public BETA in October and a public release in November. OP lagged slightly behind that, with a staged public release the first week of December.

There was some gnashing of teeth over on the OnePlus forums, but in the grand scheme of Android updates, slipping a couple weeks is far from the worst performance we’ve seen.

What’s interesting from a reviewer perspective, is getting to test a phone which launched with Android 8, and see how this hardware holds up on Android 10. Two significant updates.

I’ve mentioned numerous times before, the update from Android 8 to Android 9 arrived with some noticeable performance hits. One example on the OnePlus 6 specifically, using Google Photos to stabilize one minute of UHD video, went from 69 seconds to 81 seconds after the update.

Android 10 has been touted as a better performing OS, and OnePlus is a terrific platform to test those claims. The brand delivers some of the snappiest devices available, at any price point.

Conclusion: The OnePlus 6 mostly did get faster!

Android 10 and OnePlus optimization seems to be “peanut butter jelly time”.

Not to put TOO much value on synthetic benchmarks, but Geekbench 5 shows a roughly 4-5% improvement in the final score. I doubt the phone really did just magically get 5% faster in all tasks, but it is 5% faster at running Geekbench. That’s not nothing.

Better still, that pesky video stabilization test now bests the results we used to see on Android 8. From 69 seconds down to 62. I ran the OnePlus 6T on Android 9 again just to double check, and ended up with a time of 83 seconds. Android 9 does not like Google’s video stabilization plugin.

Video rendering saw a small but consistent improvement.

My new render test is one minute of UHD video over 6 ten-second clips, with transitions, a watermark, and a soundtrack. The OnePlus 6 on Android 9 completed the render in two minutes and eighteen seconds. Upgrading the phone to Android 10 brought that time down four seconds. Again, testing the OnePlus 6T on Android 10 confirmed about a four second difference in performance.

I’m still structuring a good compression test, loading a bunch of audio files into a folder, then timing how fast they’re compressed and extracted. Android 10 was consistently slower than Android 9, but in a range so close I’m tempted to call it margin of error. Where a test could take a minute to run, the differences were typically within two seconds. I need to structure that test a bit better before sharing more results.

Just as Snappy

Above all, I’m just thankful the phone still feels quick. I think we’ve all been in that situation where we finally get an update, and then the phone performs slower or stutters through the UI. I don’t know of many consumers that would be able to detect the differences in performance between the OnePlus 6 and a more recent flagship phone from 2019. In fact a few newer phones might feel pokier by comparison.

Oxygen OS (OnePlus’ custom spin on stock Android) really is something special. I still fully believe manufacturers like Samsung and LG can innovate on top of Android, and fill some of the gaps Google leaves behind.

Oxygen is different though. A “stock adjacent” flavor of Android, which still improves on the customization of Google’s platform, offers up some fun unique perks, but is instantly recognizable to folks who like a more “pure” experience.

Returning to the OnePlus 6 specifically, it’s another data point reinforcing the idea that OnePlus really will update and support older handsets. The OP6 didn’t get the fastest update. Bundled with the 6T, they were pushed to a second tier. However, “Second Tier” OnePlus support is still faster than most of the rest of the Android industry.

2020 will be a challenging year for OnePlus

OnePlus released significantly more phones this year than last. Rumors point to even more phones coming from OnePlus next year. That puts additional strain on resources to support and update older phones. OnePlus might already be struggling, given that the Android 10 update was released for the 2018 phones BEFORE the 2019 5G devices.

Google proved surprisingly capable of getting updates out for three years of phones on day one, but even Google is struggling with monthly patches for all the Pixel phones.

I don’t believe we’ll see that kind of “day-one” response from OnePlus in the future. Instead, I think we’ll see the company pivot to a more traditional staggered model. We can hope that “slower” updates from OP still manage to outpace larger brands (who should be able to devote more resources to support).

And when we get those updates, we can all hope they continue to improve the performance of our gadgets. Trust is a precious commodity in the tech space.

The Android 10 update for the OnePlus 6 affirms that my trust wasn’t misplaced.