In big news today, OnePlus has announced that OxygenOS 13 will be a near stock Android experience. In other words, the company has backtracked on their misadventure of changing the appearance of their custom user interface to that of OPPO’s ColorOS. The announcement was made in the official OnePlus forums by Pete Lau, founder of the company.
It was a bad idea from the get-go, considering that it was one of the key distinguishing features of OnePlus devices and a major attraction for the brand. You don’t throw that kind of edge away just like that. You can read the announcement below.

Back in September, we announced the codebase for both OxygenOS and ColorOS would merge with the goal of creating one unified and upgraded operating system for both brands globally. While OxygenOS and ColorOS will continue to be developed on the same codebase – to allow for faster updates and better build quality – OxygenOS and ColorOS will remain independent brand properties. This new course was taken in accordance with feedback from our Community – we understand users of OxygenOS and ColorOS want each operating system to remain separate from each other with their own distinct properties.
Our software philosophy for OxygenOS has always been to offer users a light and clean experience that is close to stock Android and oriented towards usage globally. With OxygenOS 13, we want to deliver an experience that long-time OnePlus users will be familiar with while ensuring it upholds hallmarks of OxygenOS, like a fast and smooth experience, burdenless design, and ease of use. OxygenOS 13 will retain its unique visual design and a range of exclusive customization features.
In brief, while both ColorOS and OxygenOS will share underlying code, they will retain their distinct visual differences. That’s good enough. Everyone is happy.
There has to be jubilation in the OnePlus community over this news. I had been looking forward to experiencing OxygenOS before the OPPO-OnePlus merger announcement last year. I promptly lost a huge chunk of interest. With this backtracking, once again, I am looking forward to experiencing OxygenOS this year. My first OnePlus smartphone is on the way.
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Founder of MobilityArena. Yomi’s journey in mobile started in 2001. Besides obsessing over mobile phones, he also started creating WAP sites (early mobile-friendly websites created with WML). He began writing about phones in 2004 and has been at it since then. He has owned over 200 devices, from Symbian, Palm, PocketPC/Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/BB10, webOS, Windows Phone, Firefox, Ubuntu Touch, to Android, iOS, and KaiOS operating systems.