- Popular benchmark site Geekbench has removed OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts.
- The removal is due to allegations that OnePlus designed Oxygen OS optimization tools in such a way that Geekbench views them as cheating.
- This isn’t the first time OnePlus has been in hot water for benchmark cheating, although this time is less egregious than some others.
Yesterday, AnandTech posted some information about “weird behavior” it spotted with the OnePlus 9 Pro. According to the team’s research, Oxygen OS apparently limits the performance of some popular Android apps — but none of those apps are benchmark suites.
Related: OnePlus 9, OnePlus 9 Pro, and OnePlus 9R buyer’s guide: What you need to know
Geekbench, one of the more popular benchmarking sites, took these allegations seriously. After conducting its own investigation, Geekbench recently announced that it has removed all OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts.
Geekbench called Oxygen OS’s behavior a form of “benchmark manipulation.” OnePlus has yet to issue a statement on the matter.
OnePlus 9 benchmarks: What’s going on?
In some of our own testing, we found that AnandTech’s data is on the mark. We found that the OnePlus 9 series limits the performance of Google Chrome while older OnePlus phones do not.
OnePlus is no stranger to benchmark manipulation. For the OnePlus 5, eagle-eyed users caught the company pushing the performance capabilities of its devices way up when the operating system detected a benchmark app. This resulted in artificially inflated scores that users would not see during real-world usage.
This situation is different from that, though. Here, OnePlus appears to be limiting the performance of certain apps, likely in an attempt to conserve battery power. This isn’t a problem, but the fact that benchmark apps are not also affected by these optimizations misrepresents what the user will actually experience with the phone. In other words, it’s not blatant cheating but still could give a false impression to a potential buyer if they just looked at OnePlus 9 benchmarks.