When Oppo unveiled the ColorOS 12 skin based on Android 12 last week, a lot of our readers had just one doubt – will OnePlus phones run ColorOS instead of OxygenOS moving forward? Well, your worst fears have come true. In an official blog post talking about the future of OnePlus as a company, CEO Pete Lau has confirmed that OnePlus phones will run a ‘unified and upgraded operating system’ that merges the best of both worlds – OxygenOS and ColorOS.
Yeah, you read that right, and that’s what everyone expected after hearing about the merger of OnePlus with Oppo earlier this year. In line with this merger, the software teams of both companies have been working together on codebase integration. That’s going as expected, says Lau in the blog post. They are working to achieve the same goals for the software experience – fast and smooth, simple and stable. But, Lau adds that the unified OS will retain the DNA of OxygenOS while offering a more stable and bug-free experience.
If you didn’t already know, the reasoning for merging ColorOS and OxygenOS was revealed by OnePlus earlier this year. It’s to ensure faster development times and quicker update rollouts. Oppo will enable OxygenOS to be built on a more stable and stronger platform moving forward, said Lau earlier this year. Also, maintaining one common operating system makes sense from a business standpoint as well.
Now, I know many of you are taken aback by this news, but there’s a caveat. As the title says, this unified OS will not arrive until next year. OnePlus 2022 flagships, i.e OnePlus 10 series, will be the first to launch with this unified ColorOS + OxygenOS experience out-of-the-box. Other devices will get this unified OS with the next major Android update.
What this means for existing OnePlus phone users is that you will receive the OxygenOS 12 update instead of ColorOS 12 update this year. However, not to set the expectations too high, you will definitely see some inklings and UI elements from Oppo’s ColorOS in your OnePlus device running Android 12-based OxygenOS 12. We already some of these changes in the OnePlus Nord 2 earlier this year, and you can take a look at them in our YouTube video:
