Twelve years after the launch of the OnePlus One, OnePlus announced today that it has exited the United States. It’s bittersweet, as the brand has been on a comeback tour of sorts with its excellent OnePlus 15 and widely praised (though still too expensive) OnePlus Open.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now. T-Mobile stopped stocking OnePlus’ flagship phones after 2022, instead deciding to only carry its low-end Nord devices, and Verizon’s run with OnePlus only lasted two years, from 2020 through 2021. Even though it continued releasing flagships, OnePlus’ US footprint has been fading. In January, Android Headlines even claimed that the brand was being completely dismantled, though OnePlus denied that report.
This outcome didn’t seem inevitable. In 2014, when the OnePlus One arrived, nearly every tech enthusiast I knew was buying the phone. There was a cult-like enthusiasm for OnePlus that was hard to find elsewhere, and it used that community-driven approach to develop and grow a long-lasting, loyal fan base. For a while, it was practically impossible to call any other phone a “good deal” when a OnePlus phone also existed.
But most of the sales were online-only, directly from OnePlus. When it decided to officially launch through carriers in the US, it was probably doomed from the start.
OnePlus first launched on a US carrier in 2018, and according to T-Mobile, nearly 200,000 customers had already been using OnePlus phones on its network before it officially carried the devices. That’s far from Samsung or Apple numbers, which accounted for an estimated 90 percent of all phones sold at US carriers in 2020, but there was a case for T-Mobile trying to capture OnePlus’ growing enthusiast fan base.
What is the value of a $600 “flagship killer” versus a $1,200 flagship if there is no tangible price difference?
OnePlus grew its loyal fan base primarily through its “Never Settle” moniker, implying that you shouldn’t have to settle for inferior specs when you buy an affordable phone. It used the phrase “Flagship killer” to describe this ratio of price to performance, and fans ate it up. Especially in 2014, near the end of the “2-year phone contract era,” people were begging for a device you could buy outright without being locked into a long and resentful relationship with your telecom.
But that’s just not how people buy phones in the US. Here, it’s all about carrier deals, and specifically, bill credits. The bill credit model gets a phone in your hand immediately, often with no upfront cost, and the price of the phone is diluted into your phone plan for 24 to 36 months. T-Mobile will give you a brand new 256GB iPhone 17 Pro today for just $4.16 a month on top of your phone plan. If you’re on AT&T, you can get that same phone for just $2.78 per month, as long as you trade in a phone and “upgrade to a qualifying unlimited plan.” And yes, that qualifying plan starts at $80 a month. If you switch carriers early, you’ll owe the remaining retail cost of the phone.
You can see why this might incentivize a carrier to focus on selling expensive flagships and not “affordable” flagship killers. Carriers want to offer you the idea of a deal, and if your new phone feels like it costs less than three bucks a month, that feels much better than paying $600 out of pocket, even if you’re paying much more than that over time.
What made OnePlus attractive was fundamentally in opposition to this model. What is the value of a $600 “flagship killer” versus a $1,200 flagship if there is no tangible price difference? The carriers need you to stay on their premium plans, and if they’ll only have $600 hanging over your head instead of $1,200, they have less incentive to carry these devices. Add to the fact that reportedly 75 percent of all smartphones sold at carrier stores are now iPhones, with Samsung making up another 15 percent or so, and there isn’t a whole lot of pie left to go around.
The main line that did well for OnePlus in the US is its ultra-affordable Nord series, claiming 428 percent growth for the company in the first half of 2021. But after it lost its deal with T-Mobile in 2022, it was much harder for OnePlus to move volume. The US phone market is carrier dependent in almost every way, and without T-Mobile stores stocking the phones, it became hard for OnePlus to justify even selling the Nord here.
The ethos of OnePlus has always been about value for money. That is fundamentally at odds with the incentive system of the US phone market, which prioritizes trapping users in long-term relationships. OnePlus was already fighting for scraps here. OnePlus tried to kill the flagship, but in the end it was the flagships, sold by carriers, that killed OnePlus.
Clarification, July 16th: The first sentence of this post originally referred to OnePlus’s “eight-year run,” counting from its 2018 availability directly from T-Mobile; it now counts from the 2014 launch of the OnePlus One.