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OnePlus will implement a fan’s idea into its OxygenOS

Feb 05, 2019, 2:45 AM

Georgi Zarkov

OnePlus will implement a fan’s suggestion into its OxygenOS

We’ve all had moments when we were doing something on our phones and wished they had a function that would make our lives easier. Or maybe you’ve had an awesome idea about a neat feature that somehow nobody thought of (they probably did though). Well, in those cases, there’s not much you can do about it beyond sharing it with friends or sending a tweet to a company’s official account, only for it to be lost in the see of people asking when said company will bring back the headphone jack or something pointless like that.

OnePlus, being the community-oriented company that it is, decided to give its fans a proper outlet for their ideas and promises that one of them will make it into a future version of OxygenOS, the Android version that comes on every OnePlus smartphone. The initiative is called #PMChallenge (PM stands for Product Manager) and was announced yesterday on the company's forums.

So, what do you have to do to participate? Don’t worry, no coding skills will be needed, but you will have to put a bit more effort than saying “I want a four-way split-screen mode pls, k 10x bye”. You’ll have to flesh out your idea by answering the same questions OnePlus uses when evaluating suggestions from its own product managers, which are:

Who are the users?

What is the proposed function?

What is the user value?

If there are existing comparable functions in the smartphone industry, how is your proposed feature superior?

To add some further depth to your idea, you’ll also need to:

Explain the logic behind this product and how you want it to be implemented
Include directions and details via diagram sketches. Draw each screen and show the flow from screen to screen.

If you want to participate, you better hurry, suggestions will be accepted until February 22. The winner and, of course, the winning idea, will be announced by OnePlus “by mid-March” and work will begin on the feature immediately. But wait, what does the winner actually get?

According to the announcement, the winner will get to experience a OnePlus launch event as a VIP guest and receive the device that has the feature they came up with. Considering the timeline of the contest and assuming the suggested feature won’t be something groundbreaking and tedious to code, that device might be the OnePlus 7, which if we go by previous releases, should come in June 2019.

Now, we’re sure at least some of you are thinking “OnePlus is using its fans’ free labor to make new features and subsequently money, bring me my pitchfork!”, but the rules and rewards are quite clear (always read the terms and conditions!), so if people want to spend some of their free time to contribute to the devices they love, then more power to them! Plus, a phone, a trip and some bragging rights are fair compensation for answering a few questions and creating a few mock-up screens, we think.

If you’re interested to see what ideas people are coming up with, you can check the list of successful entries on the OnePlus community forums.