Earlier this month, it was revealed that the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro were throttling the performance of some applications to improve battery life. Chrome, Twitter, Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and many other apps were affected, causing the OnePlus 9 series to be de-listed by GeekBench. Even though OnePlus continues to defend the functionality, the company is adding a setting to turn off performance modifications.

OnePlus confirmed to Android Police today that the same app throttling functionality will be present in the new OnePlus Nord 2, but that an option will eventually be available for turning it off across all OnePlus phones:

"Since different chips perform differently and we want to make sure to get the best performance and efficiency out of each one, we've implemented performance optimizations to varying degrees on the OnePlus 9R and Nord 2. However, given the clear feedback from users and media, our R&D team is currently working to add an option to let users turn on/off this optimized mode and have better control over the performance of their phones. We're targeting to have this solution ready with one of the first builds of OxygenOS 12."

The statement doesn't clarify exactly how the option will work. It could be a per-app setting (like Android's built-in battery saving functionality), which would be annoying to deal with, or it could be a toggle that affects all applications. It's also not a good sign that the feature will arrive as part of OxygenOS 12 (based on Android 12), as OnePlus usually takes a long time to update its phones to new major Android releases.

Alongside this new toggle to disable CPU throttling, the OxygenOS 12 update will also bring a theme store feature. It's likely that the OxygenOS 12 update will also bring the integrated ColorOS codebase following OnePlus' merger with OPPO. The new Nord 2 is the first phone from OnePlus to feature ColorOS-based software, though it's unclear if other OnePlus phones will be upgraded to OxygenOS 11.3 or if they'll skip straight to OxygenOS 12.