OnePlus may be best known for its smartphones, but the brand also makes some excellent audio accessories. The Bullets Wireless and Bullets Wireless 2 were some of our favorite Bluetooth wireless earphones when they launched in 2018 and 2019 thanks to their long-lasting battery life, quick charging support, and overall value-for-money. This year, OnePlus announced the even more affordable Bullets Wireless Z earphones, but what we're really looking forward to are their upcoming truly wireless earbuds which could be called the OnePlus Pods.

Since mid-May, notable Twitter leaker Max J. has been hinting at the launch of TWS earbuds from OnePlus. His latest leak revealed the possible design of the new earbuds, as shown in the image above. He suggests a possible July launch for the new audio accessory, which may coincide with the launch of the OnePlus 8T. While digging into the newly released Android 11 beta for the OnePlus 8 series, frequent XDA Portal tipster and Senior Member Some_Random_Username discovered evidence of the existence of new TWS earbuds from OnePlus.

In the new Settings APK from the Android 11 beta, Some_Random_Username discovered the following string:

        <string name="oneplus_tws_pods_funtion">Headset function</string>
    

The "oneplus_tws_pods" in the string's title piqued our interest, so we dug a bit deeper into the firmware. The only other references to anything related to OnePlus TWS earbuds were contained in the decompiled code of the Settings app. We discovered multiple references to "OnePlus Pods" and a companion application package named "com.oneplus.twspods" in classes including BluetoothDashboardFragment, BluetoothDeviceDetailsFragment, OnePlusPodDevice, and OnePlusUpdate.

In the BluetoothDashboardFragment class, there's code to read the individual battery level of the left and right earbud, which is something that's only needed for truly wireless earbuds as each bud has its own battery. In some parts, there are mentions of an "oppoPodsService" which may suggest a relation between the OnePlus Pods and one of OPPO's existing truly wireless earbuds—perhaps the OPPO Enco W31 or OPPO Enco Free? The BluetoothDeviceDetailsFragment class references double-tap actions for playing/pausing music or skipping to the next/previous song, OTA updates, and a "find my Bluetooth earphone" setting which could be related to Google's new Find My Accessory feature for Fast Pair devices.

What I've just mentioned are all expected features of any half-decent truly wireless earbuds, but OnePlus will likely have more to surprise us with. Perhaps the OnePlus Pods will support some kind of fast charging? There's also the question of the design, pricing, availability, and most importantly, the audio quality. We don't know much about these TWS earbuds, but we're now pretty certain they actually exist.


Thanks to PNF Software for providing us a license to use JEB Decompiler, a professional-grade reverse engineering tool for Android applications.