Earlier this week, tech site AnandTech posted a report about the OnePlus 9 Pro’s performance and how the phone seemingly left benchmark apps alone, but seemingly and purposely reduced the performance of popular apps. Shortly after, Geekbench delisted both the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro from its charts, and that prompted a response from the self-titled smartphone brand.
The official statement, which was released to XDA, says that the reason behind the alleged performance throttling was due to OnePlus’ R&D team working on the OnePlus 9 Pro’s performance optimisation with popular apps, which includes Chrome. And that the team was trying to match the app’s processor requirements with an appropriate amount of power, therefore leading to a “smooth experience while reducing power consumption”.
It's disappointing to see OnePlus handsets making performance decisions based on application identifiers rather than application behavior. We view this as a form of benchmark manipulation. We've delisted the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro from our Android Benchmark chart. https://t.co/G40wmWeg7o
— Geekbench (@geekbench) July 6, 2021
While the statement sounds par for the course, XDA does point out that the wording implies that OnePlus had only implemented this performance behaviour after the phone’s launch. By the account of another mobile tech site, PhoneArena, the performance throttling issues seems to have been present even before the phone’s official launch. Specifically, during the review period, when different tech media entities were given the phone for testing.
For now, the OnePlus 9 Pro remains delisted from Geekbench’s Android Benchmark chart. In addition, the benchmark service also said that it will be testing other OnePlus handsets to ascertain if they had been tweaked in a similar fashion and if they do, they too would be removed from the charts.
