Picture this scenario: you launch the phone dialer app on your phone, but instead of being greeted with a pristine dialer screen, your screen is instead littered with banner ads for products, services, and restaurants. Wouldn’t that be annoying? If you think that it is, be thankful that you do not live in China.
According to reports, it seems that the OnePlus 3 handset in China has ads baked into the system apps on the phone. Users are claiming that the dialer interface has a “Live Services” feed which shows banners for all kinds of products and services, and to make it worse, it seems that these ads are outsourced meaning that OnePlus doesn’t even get to control what ads are displayed.
Now you’re probably wondering, “But I don’t live in China, this shouldn’t affect me, right?” For the most part you’re probably right and you can go ahead and buy the OnePlus 3 without any issues. However OnePlus did announce that they have plans to eventually merge its operating systems. Right now there is Oxygen OS which is for everywhere else but China, while in China OnePlus uses Hydrogen OS.
We can only hope that by merging the platforms that ads baked into system apps will not be a feature that is brought over.