For the better part of a decade, a OnePlus phone has found its place in my pocket. When someone asked me for a recommendation — be it someone looking to upgrade to a no-nonsense, feature-packed smartphone, or a tinkerer looking for a platform to play around with — my answer was always a OnePlus smartphone. Between the great hardware, clean software out of the box, and a price tag that skirted well below other flagships, it was the safe recommendation. However, more than that, a OnePlus smartphone has traditionally been a smartphone that was, more or less, fully under your control.
If the phone was out of the software update guarantee period, you could install a custom ROM to breathe new life into it. If you didn’t like a software update, you could revert to the previous version. Or, if you just wanted to tinker around with hardware you owned, you could. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case.
