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We asked, you told us: You wouldn’t buy phones that throttle for battery life
August 21, 2025
OnePluswas in the headlines for the wrong reasons last week when it emerged that the firm was quietly throttling a variety of popular apps on theOnePlus 9 Proin the name of battery life.
The throttling saw apps relegated to using the slower Cortex-A55 CPU cores instead of the Snapdragon 888’s more powerful CPU cores. This wasn’t an issue that the vast majority of reviewers and users noticed at first, butAnandtechwould later uncover the extent of the throttling.
Is this a deal-breaker for consumers though? Would you purchase a phone if it’s able to throttle performance for better battery life without a noticeable difference? That’s what we asked in a poll last week, accompanying reviewer Dhruv Bhutani’sopinion piece.
Would you buy a phone with throttled performance for better battery life?
We posted the poll on Saturday (July 10), counting just over 1,600 votes as of writing. The end result? Well, it’s a landslide for the “no” camp, with almost three-quarters of respondents saying they want the hardware they pay for.
It’s easy to see why people would vote for this option too, as the device costs plenty of cash. So what’s the point of spending ~$1,000 if you aren’t actually given access to all that horsepower?
Making matters worse in OnePlus’s case is the fact that it doesn’t actually give users several system-wide performance profiles. Although you do have the ability to adjust battery-saving on an app-by-app basis, as well as access to battery saver and adaptive battery options.
Just over 25% of polled readers say they’d buy a phone that throttles if there’s no discernible performance difference. This is an understandable position too, as the vast majority of phones throttle or dynamically adjust performance according to the running app and other parameters. So if a phone can do this without affecting performance in a noticeable way, you’re getting a good balance of performance and endurance in theory.
That’s it for our poll, thanks for voting and for leaving comments. Has this saga soured you off OnePlus completely or are you willing to buy future phones from the brand?
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