OnePlus News Daily Dose #6: Private DNS fix, T-Mobile and RCS compatibility, new payment options and more!

Well well well, we have just completed one week journey of this daily dose of OnePlus news! It started on last Saturday, but technically it’s not ‘daily’ anymore. ?

Jokes aside, OnePlus loves to include hidden fixes inside the builds. Remember when they silently patched the discovery and connection issues with Tile trackers without mentioning a word on the changelog? Everyone loves surprises (including Samsung publications). ?

We have found evidences of another similar easter egg fix. But first: a little background story. ?

Android 9 Pie introduced many under-the-hood changes and brought new features. One of them is the ability to change system wide DNS provider.

Till Oreo, there is no native way to set a global DNS provider in Android. The limitation may sound astonishing, but you can only define per connection wise DNS. Third party solutions involve root or using a local VPN.

Pie unveiled a feature called ‘Private DNS‘ which enables end users to set a global DNS server. Moreover, it brings DNS over TLS (DoT) support as an extra level of security.

There were multiple reports of broken Private DNS on last January’s Open Beta (OB) builds across various platforms.

Private dns is broken on open beta 3. I can not connect to any dns.

(Source)

https://twitter.com/Me_MyseIf_nd_I/status/1090851094723481600

Both OnePlus 6 and 6T were affected, due to the shared nature of codebase. FYI, the issue is different from the soft-reboot bug while using AdGuard DNS.

OnePlus bug hunter team acknowledged the existence of the glitch.

Greetings. This is Jeff from OnePlus Bug Hunters Team, thanks for your feedback.

This issue has been forwarded to dev team. If there is any update, we will keep you posted.

Thank you and have a nice day.

High regards,
OnePlus Bug Hunters

(Source)

As a matter of fact, they suggested not to use the Private DNS feature till the next bugfix update appears.

OnePlus offered OB12 and OB4 for OnePlus 6 and 6T respectively at the end of January. They paused the rollout after a day or so due to critical bugs reported on beta builds for 5 and 5T, which were released simultaneously.

The Chinese OEM resumed the rollout for OP6/6T earlier this week. In our second daily dose, we highlighted that the new builds are exactly same as the old ones.

Here comes the easter egg: it reportedly fixed the Private DNS bug!

Updated from OB3 last night, enabled private DNS with dns.adblock.com, no problems so far. I have a tmo version updated to international via fastboot, also running magisk.

(Source)

With OB12 private DNS started to work again!!! Laboratory gives smart boost feature which uses 8gb RAM wisely and keeps some apps in ram. Update is awesome!

(Source)

Moving on, we speculated a little bit on the RCS compatibility with OnePlus phones in yesterday’s daily dose.

Rich Communication Services (RCS) is a next generation communication protocol which aims to enhance the cellular messaging by bringing features like photo/video sharing, delivery/read receipts etc.

OnePlus sells T-Mobile branded OnePlus 6T in USA, but it (in fact every other OnePlus phone) does not support RCS/’Advanced Messaging‘ with their default SMS app.

While (Android) Messages supports RCS on dual-SIM phones on most regions, North America is a notable exception.

Amir Sarhangi was the head of RCS at Google then.

A Google Product Expert on reddit has confirmed the same:

Now users are trying to do some hackjobs (like edit the build.prop to permanently turn the second SIM slot off) to get RCS working on OnePlus phones.

Do you think selling single SIM (which is a software limitation though) variant via T-Mobile and now the cohesive integration of Google Duo in OxygenOS are the indications of upcoming RCS support in OnePlus phones?

Share your views by commenting below.

Finally, let’s cross the Atlantic and jump to UK. Apart from regular payment options, OnePlus UK store has started to accept Klarna.

As a benefit, users can now spread the cost of their order over three payments – completely interest free. They can also pay 30 days after delivery.

What are you waiting for? Hurry, start shopping! Meanwhile, allow me to call it a day. See you next week. ?

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