There are not so many key smartphone manufacturers that are developing from scratch and offering real innovations to the market. Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, BBK. Here is, perhaps, the whole list. In principle, there are other brands, but most of them are not independent actors and, as a rule, belong to other, stronger players. They deliberately create new sub-brands so that there is at least some variation on the market. But there was no such thing that brands, on the contrary, were united before.
OnePlus and Oppo intend to team up to further develop new smartphones and their software. This was announced by OnePlus CEO Pete Lau at the company’s tech support forum. According to him, progress requires joint efforts. Therefore, the two brands decided to merge technically. This is actually the key point because no takeover is planned.
OnePlus Smartphone Firmware
The merger in question will indeed be purely technical because the brands themselves will retain independence and the right to implement their business strategies. That is, neither OnePlus nor Oppo will disappear from the market. It’s just that now they will have a lot more in common than they used to. Shared resources, research and development, and funding will help companies become stronger and more aggressively conquer the smartphone market.
According to Pete Lau, the merger of OnePlus and Oppo will expand the lineup of each brand, as well as improve their software. The fact is that now more developers, testers, and debuggers will be involved in the creation of shells for smartphones of each brand, who will be able to develop Oxygen OS and Color OS more effectively, identifying bugs and shortcomings in a timely manner.
The merger should be beneficial to both companies. It will help OnePlus gain a foothold in the low-cost segment, which the brand is clearly having trouble promoting. After all, the OnePlus N10, the N100, and the OnePlus X that preceded them – all turned out frankly so-so and were not popular. With Oppo smartphones, the trend is reversed. The company makes excellent state employees, but somehow it does not go well with flagships.
Android for Chinese smartphones
Another thing is that OnePlus and Oppo are already siblings since both descended from the Chinese manufacturing concern BBK. He also owns the Vivo brand, which is very popular, so it is possible that he will also enter the Oppo-OnePlus alliance. After all, its flagships are also not particularly popular with the audience, which prefers to take mainly budget devices of the brand.
So, by and large, the planned merger is not that, because the companies were not very divided initially. They clearly have the same research centers, and the differences in their devices are only in semitones. Because from a hardware point of view, they are the same plus or minus. The only area where I would expect tangible improvements is in software that more people will work on and that can become more versatile.
After all, versatility will mean that the software of smartphones Oppo and OnePlus – and in the future, perhaps, and Vivo – will be natively compatible with each other. And this, in turn, may lead to the fact that brands will simply create their own analog of Android, which will already be a real operating system.
