OnePlus 3 Loop VR launch failed

Like thousands of OnePlus fans, I too sat around with the OnePlus Loop VR headset on Tuesday, waiting for VR to launch on a virtual space station. For a brand that needs to stand out in an increasingly crowded market, giving fans this kind of unique experience is a powerful idea that would help the OnePlus 3 stand out. Unfortunately, the idea was better than the execution, and it left us longing for the OnePlus 2’s 360-degree virtual reality live launch.

OnePlus is an interesting phone maker whose devices have gotten better and better, as you can see in our OnePlus 3 review. However, it seems that while the phones are getting better, the launch experiences are getting worse. .

Because while thousands of people were patiently waiting for OnePlus to launch, the app received a last-minute update – over 600MB. Even if you have a fast connection, downloading a 600MB upgrade will take some time. For most people in India, this is a several hour download.

So at this point people probably wanted a VR stream of the event, like last year. Of course, there were also some issues with this approach – it wasn’t exactly practical if you were trying to report on the event because you were locked into the VR screen, but even if you were only a fan of the brand, you wouldn’t. You won’t be able to tweet or express your support online until after the official launch. But having stuff live meant you weren’t stuck waiting for a huge download, right?

The uploaded data was probably video content to let you explore Loop’s “space station” without much buffering, but while there was no buffering, there was when even a lot of problems. For one thing, the video was quite blurry – something we didn’t expect after a forced download. Then the details shared in the app were also quite limited. If you really wanted to know more about the phone, you better read one of the many leaks that took place earlier today.

Instead, the app was just good for collecting badges to order the phone a little earlier, but many people on the OnePlus forums said that when they collected the badges, they didn’t receive the phone. e-mail to buy the phone. On the same thread, others talked about not being able to download the app, and many said the app was crashing for them on multiple devices. Worse still, the big “advantage” of using the app and exploring VR was that you could buy the phone before anyone else – except that at least in India the phone was already on sale on Amazon well before launch. , negating any benefit.

And that’s a problem. The people who lined up to use this app were OnePlus superfans – the people who care about the brand the most and are most likely to evangelize it to their friends and family. When it’s the users who have a terrible experience with OnePlus, it really hurts the brand. It’s really surprising that even though the phones are getting better, the launch events have gotten worse.