GoKawiilis a technology reporter who has been covering the industry since 2007. He co-hosts the Waveform podcast with MKBHD. A former engineer, he now specializes in topics like computational photography and social media protocols.
After an eight-year run, OnePlus announced today that it has exited the United States. It’s bittersweet, as the brand has been on a comeback tour of sorts with its excellent OnePlus 15 and widely-praised (though still too expensive) OnePlus Open.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now. T-Mobile stopped stocking OnePlus’ flagship phones after 2022, instead deciding to only carry its low-end Nord devices, and Verizon’s run with OnePlus only lasted two years, from 2020 through 2021. Even though it continued releasing flagships, OnePlus’ US footprint has been fading. In January, Android Headlines even claimed that the brand was being completely dismantled, though OnePlus denied that report.
The phones got better, but was it enough? Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
This outcome didn’t seem inevitable. In 2014, when the OnePlus One launched, nearly every tech enthusiast I knew was buying the phone. There was a cult-like enthusiasm for OnePlus that was hard to find elsewhere, and it used that community-driven approach to develop and grow a long-lasting, loyal fan base. For a while, it was practically impossible to call any other phone a “good deal” when a OnePlus phone also existed.
But most of the sales were online-only, directly from OnePlus. When it decided to officially launch through carriers in the US, it was probably doomed from the start.
OnePlus first launched on a US carrier in 2018, and according to T-Mobile, nearly 200,000 customers had already been using OnePlus phones on its network before it officially carried the devices. That’s far from Samsung or Apple numbers, which accounted for an estimated 90 percent of all phones sold at US carriers in 2020, but there was a case for T-Mobile trying to capture OnePlus’ growing enthusiast fan base.
What is the value of a $600 “flagship killer” versus a $1,200 flagship if there is no tangible price difference?
OnePlus grew its loyal fanbase primarily through its “Never Settle” moniker, implying that you shouldn’t have to settle for inferior specs when you buy an affordable phone. It used the phrase “Flagship killer” to describe this ratio of price to performance, and fans ate it up. Especially in 2014, near the end of the “2-year phone contract era”, people were begging for a device you could buy outright without being locked into a long and resentful relationship with your telecom.
But that’s just not how people buy phones in the US Here, it’s all about carrier deals, and specifically, bill credits. The bill credit model gets a phone in your hand immediately, often with no upfront cost, and the price of the phone is diluted into your phone plan for 24 to 36 months. T-Mobile will give you a brand new 256GB iPhone 17 Pro today for just $4.16 a month on top of your phone plan. If you’re on AT&T, you can get that same phone for just $2.78 per month, as long as you trade in a phone and “upgrade to a qualifying unlimited plan”. And yes, that qualifying plan starts at $80 a month. If you switch carriers early, you’ll owe the remaining retail cost of the phone.
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