Chinese mobile upstarts OnePlus and Oppo – already owned by the same parent company – have confirmed they are to merging teams with the idea of combining development resources.
In a post on the OnePlus forum, co-founder and CEO Pete Lau said both companies will continue to forge an independent path, but users will benefit from deeper integration between the two teams.
Lau said those benefits will include smoother and faster software updates for OnePlus users. He also said the deeper integration will ensure greater product development resources.
He wrote: “I’m confident that this change will be positive for our community and our users. With this deeper integration with OPPO, we will have more resources at hand to create even better products for you. It will also allow us to be more efficient, for example, bringing faster and more stable software updates for OnePlus users – considered among the best mobile phones money can buy.
“As for the OnePlus brand – we will continue to operate independently, focused on providing you with the best possible products and experience as we have always done. We will continue launching OnePlus products, holding events (hopefully in person soon) and engaging directly with you for feedback through the same OnePlus channels as before. OnePlus’ commitment to you remains the same.”
Since last year Lau has been overseeing both OnePlus and Oppo product development and it’s clear he saw greater opportunity for synergy. We’ve often seen overlap in the technologies pushed by OnePlus and Oppo. The OnePlus 8 Pro looks a lot like the Oppo Find X2 Pro, for example. The latter often taking a few more risks with super-innovative features that haven’t always made it to OnePlus phones. We don’t expect this to change.
Along with OnePlus and Oppo, the Chinese company BBK electronics also owns smartphone makers RealMe and Vivo, but there’s no indication of greater synergy among all four firms right now.
The new alignment is ironic given rival company Huawei has officially spun out its Honor sub brand into it’s own company. That has resulted in Honor phones being able to run the full suite of Google services on the new Honor 50 series.
