OnePlus News Daily Dose #39: Open Ears Forum India, OnePlus 7 case leak, 3/3T data corruption and more!

The concept of OnePlus Open Ears Forum (OEF) is all about an effective way to reach to the local communities. The Shenzhen based OEM organized a number of such events in past.

In each of those forums, they highlighted a specific topic and kickstarted the discussion. Ranging from Camera to customer services, the OEFs boosted the vision of OnePlus by rich community interactions.

Prior Open Ears forum were held in Europe, India and the USA. In fact, they are going to organize another such forum on April 13 in New York City.

Don’t be upset my fellow Indian OnePlus fans, as the smartphone maker has also announced about the second Open Ears Forum in India!

They did the first OEF in India after the launch of OnePlus 6, back in July 2018. Held in the surreal state of Goa, the first India edition of the OnePlus Open Ears was focused on ‘Product’.

In the second iteration, OnePlus is trying to focus on software development as well as community programs.

With this edition of Open Ears Forum, we aim to discuss how we can better support developers in building great software as well as see what new programs and initiatives we can explore with our community.

The event will take place on May 8, which is almost 10 months after the first one. The venue remains unchanged, so be prepared to pack your bathing suits.

Interested users need to apply through this online questionnaire. For Indian citizens, OnePlus will be taking care of travel and accommodation for the attendees.

Last year, they selected 30 applicants. Probably the same pattern will be followed in this event as well.

The team has included a funny twist in the application process:

The Mystery Code

We’ve added in a little something to the application process which could get you some extra points. It’s simple. All you have to do is to visit the application page on the 4th of April between 10 AM and 3 PM and search for our mystery riddle. If you can solve the riddle, mail your answer to [email protected] with the subject line: ‘Open Ears Code’ from your OnePlus registered email id.

However, the code breaking is entirely optional. ?

To know more, visit the official announcement thread.

In yesterday’s daily dose of OnePlus news, we talked about how the OnePlus forums (both global and Chinese) turned into a wild west after the release and subsequent leak of the closed beta builds of OnePlus 3 and 3T Pie update.

However, the release was indeed helpful for legit users. XDA recognized developer dianlujitao, who is also the official LineageOS maintainer of OnePlus 3 and 3T, discovered a peculiar bug.

If your data is encrypted and bootloader is unlocked, after upgrading to Pie modem firmware, there’s 100% chance of your data to become corrupted, and probably no way to restore them. The cause is on firmware side, probably something wrong with key migration, so there’s no way for 3rd party developers to fix it.

Note that which ROM was in use pre-upgrade doesn’t matter at all, i.e., if bootloader was unlocked and you were upgrading from OOS 5.0.8(enforce encryption by default) to OOS 9.0, you’ll lose all personal data after reboot from recovery installation. Interestingly, everything works as expected if bootloader was locked.

Data corruption is a serious issue, and it certainly needs more attention.However, the use case is very underdeveloped at this moment.

dianlujitao further added:

I couldn’t comprehend why do they apply diverse low-level strategies to locked and unlocked bootloader. Arguably this is a bug and should be fixed when they started rolling OTA updates to the public, but it’s also possible that this is by design and aims to restrict “unsafe” operations. Regardless, always be careful and backup your data before upgrading firmware in the near future.

TL;DR, always back up your precious data. If possible, opt for a second (even third) instance of backup.

Meanwhile, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau decided to visit the prestigious Stanford Graduate School of Business. He discussed about the product strategy and “core values” of OnePlus with a group of delegates.

Oh! I almost forgot this one.

Several no-name hard cases with a kickstand have surfaced on the internet, which are allegedly applicable for OnePlus 7.

Slashleaks has listed them as well, but the entry is locked at the time of writing this article. While they are certainly inline with the previous leaks, I advise you to take them with a grain of salt.

Let’s call it a day. See you guys tomorrow!

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