After reporting the news of the landing of the OnePlus 10 Pro in Italy and the first official information on the OnePlus Nord N20, let’s go back to talking about the Chinese brand, more particularly its proprietary interface OxygenOS; it is no secret that this interface shares a common base with OPPO’s ColorOS, despite the fact that the brand tends to deny it, and a change derived from this base has been noticed, which leads to the strange behavior of the automatic refresh rate, on the displays of devices equipped with OxygenOS.
Although the most recent version of OxygenOS is 12, it is already from version 11 that the brand allows the achievement of the maximum update frequency only to certain apps, which are part of specific lists; although some of the most popular applications do not suffer from this problem, the same cannot be said for all: apps like Youtube and TikTok for example run at 60 Hz, making scrolling less fluid inside them.
A Reddit user recently brought to the attention of the community a similar behavior reserved for the Sync for Reddit client: it was noticed that when playing videos, such as autoplaying in the feed, the overall frame rate of devices equipped with OxygenOS drops at 60 Hz as long as the media content is playing. It should be noted that, prior to the advent of OxygenOS 12 and its ColorOS-based modifications, third-party applications such as AutoHzthey were able to force the device to display refresh rate at will, both for specific apps and at a general level; but now this solution no longer works.
The developer of the application has confirmed that the cause of the current failure of the app is due to the changes introduced in ColorOS and consequently in OxygenOS; however, the developer is hard at work trying to restore the functionality of his application, even on the most recent versions of the interfaces.
It is not clear how all this happens: it would seem that OxygenOS, under certain circumstances, ignores the system settings relating to the refresh rate, lowering it arbitrarily; it is also not clear the main purpose of the brand behind this behavior, if this solution had been adopted for alleged advantages towards energy consumption (therefore advantages for the battery of the device) and it is not clear why other smartphone manufacturers have not adopted a policy similar; in fact, by way of example, neither Samsung nor Google have similar behavior on their devices.
OnePlus has however been made aware of the issue and the community is therefore awaiting a more detailed response from the brand, as well as a precise list of the applications affected by this practice and the circumstances in which users can encounter the arbitrary reduction in frequency. update.