Early speculation: OnePlus 7 may feature HDR streaming out of box

OnePlus stormed the Android community with the introduction of OnePlus One running Cyanogen OS. Close to stock OS with a long list of features and customizations on top of ‘flagship killer’ specs was an instant hit.

And there were controversies… a lot of it! But that’s not the theme of this article.

After the separation from Cyanogen Inc., OnePlus hired most of the Paranoid Android team to develop their in-house OxygenOS. They remained faithful to their past, and created something which is still praised by users and critics.

Bundling bloatware is an open secret way for OEMs to generate revenues. OnePlus experienced unexpected debacle before for pre-installing an unforeseen app, so this time they are asking for user opinions.

Last Thursday (24th January) Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus posted a thread on official OnePlus forum. As a representative of the company, he wanted the users to vote about preloading an app stub for HDR streaming.

We’re currently looking at new ways to offer our users HDR streaming on our devices. Would you be open to us preloading a popular app stub (an icon that leads to Play Store) for the purposes of supporting HDR streaming?

An app stub is a popular method of distributing bloatwares. The stub takes a tiny space in system and can download the actual app after being executed by the user. It is also possible to update the actual app outside of Google Play’s update mechanism by the stub. (Facebook App Installer, anyone?)

However, we can’t get any such information from the announcement. Carl also elaborated the possible effects on UX.

Here are the pros and cons we can share so far:

* Pros 1: Offer HDR streaming, which can offer our users a higher quality streaming experience.

* Pros 2: Unleash the full potential of our future smartphone hardware.

* Cons: An app stub (an icon that leads to Play Store) will be preloaded, and it cannot be uninstalled.

Another Oneplus official David Y., who is also responsible for managing the community activities, further explained the situation.

Plus, HDR streaming requires support both from hardware side and content providers side. Here we are talking about whether our future smartphone should support HDR streaming in this popular app.

We can’t help ourselves but notice the phrase “our future smartphone”. Isn’t this a clear indication that the upcoming OnePlus 7 and the ‘exclusive’ OnePlus 5G phone will feature HDR/HDR10 streaming support out of the box? And this “popular app” is something related to flix and chill, presumably. ?

Major streaming providers like Netflix (aah! did I say the name? ) doesn’t support HDR10 on any OnePlus phone till date. Amazon unfortunately doesn’t maintain any such list for their Prime Video HDR support.

We reached out to a reliable source close to the company. According to the source, this native HDR chronicle is definitely intended for upcoming phone(s).

The current lineup is out of scope for now, the source said. It actually makes sense cause if you look at the current storage condition of OnePlus phones, they really don’t have much space left on the system partition (/system) for new preinstalled apps.

BTW, don’t forget to cast your vote.

Are you planning to buy OnePlus 7? Or want to join the 5G master race?

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