OnePlus News Daily Dose #26: OnePlus 7 case leak, March security patch, fs0c131y and more!

Software development is a convoluted process. It’s like raising a baby – from childhood, via adolescence to adulthood.

The idea of fundamental socializing can be related to software testing as well. For children, the parents are the sole living elements in their territory. With time, they are gently exposed to the outside world, and finally being a part of it.

And here we have closed alpha testing, open beta release and at the end of the day a wider release marked as stable. Sounds familiar?

Presenting half-baked software to the masses (aka public beta testing) is pretty much copybook process. You have to prepare your infrastructure first, so that bug reports can be captured properly. Try with a smaller amount of test subjects; increment the size gradually after getting satisfactory result.

Unfortunately OnePlus made a gigantic mistake in past while beta testing. They set a star-crossed example by pushing a beta build that started bricking the phones of end users.

The Shenzhen based OEM decided to push a new set of Open Beta builds earlier today. They even published an official thread to announce the Open Beta 28 for OnePlus 5 and Open Beta 26 for OnePlus 5T, which was mysteriously vanished  after a while.

A burnt child dreads the fire. There were instant FUD about another botched update.

Did anyone see the notification for open beta 28/26 for op 5/5t? I saw this morning but now it’s not showing.

(Source)

As a matter of fact, the users of OnePlus 6 (Open Beta 14) and OnePlus 6T (Open Beta 6) started receiving the update prompt on their phones, even though it was not officially announced anywhere then.

Manu J., Global Product Operations Manager of OnePlus, eventually posted another announcement thread for OnePlus 6/6T, but the first thread has not been restored yet.

In our observation, OnePlus 5T users are now getting the update. OnePlus 5 users possibly need to wait a couple of hours more.

To get the detailed insight of the updates, as well as direct download links of the OTA zips, head over to our article by clicking here. Oh, and this time they decided to pack March security patches with these builds.

Moving on to OnePlus 7 thoerizing game, we now have a new set of render and live photos of a case which are presumably for OnePlus 7.

This leak has come from Gizmochina, which should be considered as another evidence towards the rumored vertical triple rear camera setup along with the motorized pop-up selfie camera.

There are two small cutouts at both side of the edges. The larger one to the right should house the alert slider and power button. The other one is intended for the volume rocker which is on the left.

The real life image is slightly different from the render. As you can see, the right side cutout contains a dividing block, unlike the continuous design in the render. Gizmochina also speculates that the material of the case is pure polycarbonate, although the render seems a mixture of leather and plastic.

There is always a probability that the leaked cases may end up being prototypes. Like every other smartphone manufacturer, Oneplus loves to experiment with tons of prototypes before finalizing the design.

Remember the never-officially-released gradient back version of OnePlus 6?

In fact, OnePlus 6T got a limited edition ‘Thunder Purple’ edition with a gradient back.

XDA member Cisco5 decided to go one step further. His goal was to make “… your oneplus 6T Thunder purple really purple!!!”.

With a number of mods (yes, you need root access), he managed to bring the purple theme all over the phone. The final result looked like the following:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yreIFke8bjk

Want to try it out yourself? Take a look at his guide.

Readers may recall that vigilante security researcher Robert Baptiste aka Elliot Alderson aka @fs0c131y has a love-hate relationship with OnePlus. He highlighted a number of security issues inside OnePlus firmwares in past.

Although he describes himself as the “Worst nightmare of Oneplus” (and several other entities), one of his recent tweets has revealed the ‘love’ side of the relationship. ?

See you guys tomorrow!

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