OnePlus News Daily Dose #27: #PMChallenge drama, Google Pay glitch, price hike and more!

What if you are invited to take the role of Product Manager and pitch your ideas to revamp your favorite product? OnePlus did the exact same thing by announcing #PMChallenge back in February.

They got overwhelming response from the community, and the finalist was announced two day ago. Well, we already discussed the topic in Monday’s daily dose of OnePlus news. Do give that a read to know the details.

Léandro Tijink, who goes by the handle Its.Leandroo in OnePlus forums, went to great lengths to win the competition. You can see his impressive illustrations about the overhauled OxygenOS UI/UX, which made him the champion.

However, the decision ignited a handful of controversies. Gary C., OxygenOS Operations staff, mentioned that some of the competition entries actually overlapped with the existing pre-developed features.

Several of the qualifying entries we reviewed actually contained features we were already working on. I suppose you could say here that great minds think alike. While we can’t say much about it just yet, we look forward to sharing them with you in the future.

According to some forum members, OnePlus may be trying to malign the transparency of the competition.

I’m sure more than one idea from this will be implemented and the actual idea generator won’t be even credited for the effort he/she has put in.

At least they should be honest and claim few more ideas are implemented and the credit goes to so and so person. If they don’t do it, I’ll lose the miniscule respect I have on the company.

(Source)

The debate is circling around giving proper attribution to the original concept creator(s). OnePlus Community Manager David Y. particularly emphasized about giving credit where it is due:

For the sake of transparency, Gary even disclosed the all the entries that were shortlisted for the final stage. Reworked notification management, alert slider remapping, new set of gestures and a dedicated desktop UI – TBH, the candidates really had potentials.

He further added the following:

Implementing Léandro’s tweaks in a consistent manner across the entire OS takes time and effort. Our decision making was focused on basic features (as in, easy to use, not easy to implement) that have bigger impacts on most users’ daily use and, most importantly, features that benefit the majority of our users.

OnePlus users may recall the story behind the new UI of OxygenOS that was originally introduced back in August. The current OOS 9, based on Android 9 Pie, features this revamped interface that highlights the flat and minimal design.

Rest assured, OnePlus will embrace the same philosophy while adapting Léandro’s suggestions.

On the other hand, the recent Open Beta builds for OnePlus 5/5T and OnePlus 6/6T accidentally install multiple Google Pay apps.

Users started noticing the anomaly after installing the beta.

There’s two Google pay apps in my phone!.

(Source)

same i have 2 google play now and google assistant is getting confused now

(Source)

Allow me to explain nature of the anomaly:

The first one with the blue shade in the icon is com.google.android.apps.nbu.paisa.user, which is intended for Indian users. The next one is com.google.android.apps.walletnfcrel, which is the US/international variant.

OnePlus bundles both of them with OxygenOS. Depending on the user-defined region, the appropriate app will be be installed on the fly.

Looks like someone from the development team forgot to apply the piece of code in these beta builds. ?

Oh, and Manu J. finally pushed the proper red button and restored the Open Beta 28 (OnePlus 5) and Open Beta 26 (OnePlus 5T) announcement thread.

A quick recap for who can’t get the context: they published the thread before rolling out the update, realized it later and abruptly (soft) deleted the thread.

Meanwhile, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau dropped another cryptic comment via his Weibo account.

Umm.. we get that – build quality and materials are extremely important factors for delivering a premium product. But is this another indication of a price hike?

OnePlus phones are not budget ‘flagship killer’ anymore!

Hope you guys are stashing nickels for the upcoming OnePlus 7 (or the 5G phone perhaps). Good luck with that!

I’m calling it a day. Ciao!

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