Launched earlier this month in China and with a global launch soon to follow, the OnePlus 11 has become the first device from the company slated to receive four years of Android updates and five years of security patches.
This commitment to updates and patches has now put OnePlus alongside Samsung as the Android manufacturer with the longest commitment to offering updates, beating even Google and their Pixel lineup, which offers three years of software updates and five years of security patches for the Pixel 6 and 7 series.
Now since OnePlus 11 has Android 13 running out of the box, if you stick with it for the next few years, you are guaranteed to get Android updates up to Android 17 and another extra year of security updates to fix any vulnerabilities that might arise.
This kind of commitment is highly impressive and has the potential to earn OnePlus significantly more users purely because of committing to offer longer-term support. Aside from Samsung, most other Android manufacturers typically offer two years of updates and three years of security patches for their midrange to high-end devices, with the entry-level devices rarely getting an OS upgrade once shipped.
The smartphone market is not getting massive improvements as was the case a few years ago and in some cases, newer models of a series are arguably worse than the ones that came before, losing crucial features like an SD card slot and the headphone jack while gaining marginally in chipset performance.
With OEMs committing to long-term support, it is now getting feasible to hold on to your device for longer periods of time without the fear of missing out on software upgrades and the features they introduce or your phone lacking security patches, until a device comes along offering significantly better performance than what you have, for it to be a worthy upgrade.
Now, while the OnePlus 11 is very much a flagship device, this does not necessarily mean that it will be the only one receiving this kind of support. Responding to a question on Twitter, OnePlus support has confirmed that the OnePlus 11R, a variant released for the Indian market featuring the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, will also receive four years of OS and five years of security patches.
As to whether the support will trickle down to even more affordable devices is a matter of waiting and seeing, but it is a good start, which other OEMs will hopefully follow.
