Tech's pioneer species problem: Why OnePlus had to change to survive
The company that defined enthusiast smartphones followed the same arc that kills most startups. It just did it slowly enough to live.
Carl Pei has done this before. In July 2025, he stood on stage unveiling the Nothing Phone 3 at £699, and the community that had championed his company turned on him. The price was wrong. The compromises unforgivable. He had forgotten who made him.
Pei co-founded OnePlus in 2013 and built it into something rare: a smartphone brand that enthusiasts genuinely loved. Then he watched it become indistinguishable from every other Android manufacturer. He left in 2020 to start over, to recapture what OnePlus had lost. Five years later, facing identical accusations of betrayal, he cannot escape the pattern he fled.
This is not a story about one company's choices. It is a story about why those choices were never really choices at all.
The coloniser's trap
Ecologists have a term for organisms that arrive first in hostile environments: pioneer species. Lichens gripping volcanic rock. Dandelions colonising construction sites. These creatures thrive where nothing else can, but their success contains its own undoing. By stabilising soil and accumulating nutrients, pioneers transform barren ground into territory where slower, larger competitors will eventually displace them.
The parallel to technology startups is precise. OnePlus arrived in 2014 as a pioneer colonising market territory that established players had abandoned. The smartphone industry had calcified into a Samsung-Apple duopoly, with everyone else fighting over scraps. Into this landscape came a device that seemed economically impossible: flagship specifications for $299, sold directly to consumers without carrier bloatware, advertising budgets, or retail markup.
The OnePlus One proved something valuable. It demonstrated that a substantial market existed for specification-obsessed buyers willing to research online, tolerate an invite-only purchase system, and forgo carrier subsidies. This was market-making labour. Once validated, the insight became available to everyone. Samsung could adopt rapid charging. Google could sell direct. The pioneer had prepared the ground for its own displacement.
The worst customers imaginable
By the OnePlus 7 Pro in 2019, the company had reached what many consider its peak. Pop-up selfie camera eliminating screen notches. 90Hz refresh rate before competitors adopted it. Software so responsive that phones costing twice as much felt sluggish by comparison. At $669, it demolished the value proposition of every flagship on the market.
Tech reviewers were unanimous. Marques Brownlee titled his review "Silly satisfying." Every publication agreed: best value in smartphones, full stop.
Here was the problem. Enthusiasts—the people reading reviews, comparing specifications, evangelising on forums—represent perhaps two per cent of smartphone buyers. They have the highest standards, demanding genuine innovation each generation. They have the lowest loyalty, switching to whatever offers marginally better value. They generate enormous attention but contribute little to sustainable margins. A customer who researches for weeks to avoid paying carrier markup is not a customer who will fund your next five years of operation.
OnePlus had won the hearts of people structurally incapable of sustaining a hardware business. Thrilling at launch. Catastrophic at scale.
The chasm
In 1991, consultant Geoffrey Moore published a book that would sell over a million copies by explaining why promising technology companies die during growth. His insight was simple and devastating.
Technology adopters divide into groups. Early adopters embrace products based on potential, tolerating incomplete solutions for competitive advantage. The mainstream majority demands proven reliability, peer validation, and seamless integration with existing life. Between these groups lies what Moore called the chasm—a gap so wide that strategies succeeding with early adopters actively repel the mainstream.
The enthusiast who thrills at "flagship killer" messaging is not the person browsing phones at a carrier store. The customer who appreciates unofficial water resistance ("we tested it, trust us") is not the customer who needs the insurance claim to go smoothly. Everything OnePlus did to win enthusiast devotion was precisely wrong for reaching ordinary buyers.
The mass market does not watch YouTube reviews. It wants the safe choice. The phone their friends have. The one the carrier employee recommends. OnePlus had built a brand for people who would never be their primary customers, using strategies that made their actual target market suspicious.
The graveyard
Consider Essential, founded by Andy Rubin, the creator of Android itself. The company raised $330 million. It launched a phone with genuinely innovative design—the edge-to-edge display with camera notch predated Apple's version. Rubin had credibility no other founder could match.
Essential shut down in February 2020, less than three years after shipping its only product. The camera was mediocre. Sprint exclusivity strangled distribution. The company never approached mainstream relevance. Three hundred million dollars and the most famous name in Android could not cross the chasm.
Asus tried twice. The ROG Phone began as uncompromising gaming hardware with aggressive aesthetics and enthusiast-grade specifications. The company attempted gradual normalisation: softer design, mainstream features, broader retail. Dead. The ZenPhone pivoted faster, leaping from the beloved compact ZenPhone 10 to an enormous ZenPhone 11 Ultra chasing mainstream screen-size preferences. Also dead.
OnePlus survived where these companies perished. The difference was not superior strategy or better products. The difference was speed.
The temperature rises
OnePlus raised prices so gradually that each increase seemed reasonable. The OnePlus One cost $299. The 3 reached $399. The 6 hit $529. The 8 Pro crossed $899. Each generation added fifty dollars while adding features that justified the increase—to existing customers—even as higher prices expanded appeal to buyers who associated cost with quality.
They adopted mainstream expectations one compromise at a time. The distinctive sandstone back gave way to glass. Unofficial water resistance became official IP68 certification. Direct sales expanded to carrier partnerships, starting with T-Mobile. The Hasselblad camera branding arrived with the 9 series, attempting to build the imaging credibility that mainstream buyers demand.
When flagship prices became indefensible on pure value, the Nord budget line absorbed cost-conscious defectors. Enthusiasts increasingly bought Nords while the main line pursued premium positioning against Samsung and Apple.
OnePlus never announced a transformation. Each step was defensible as evolution. The sandstone was dated; glass felt premium. Carrier deals expanded reach. Camera partnerships signalled seriousness. Only viewed across years did the accumulation become visible. The company that existed in 2024 shared a name with the company from 2014 but little else.
What remains
The OnePlus 15 is, by most accounts, a solid phone. Smooth software. Excellent battery life. Charging speed that still leads the industry. The cameras are mediocre. The design is indistinguishable from a dozen competitors. The software now closely resembles Oppo's, the sister company that was always behind the curtain.
The company no longer makes foldables. The Hasselblad partnership ended. In India, once a market where OnePlus led the premium segment, share collapsed from 21 per cent to 6 per cent after disputes with retailers over margins and warranty processing.
Yet OnePlus sold 130 million devices by 2024. Revenue reached $5 billion. The company employs thousands across multiple continents. By every commercial measure, it succeeded where Essential failed, where Asus failed, where dozens of enthusiast darlings failed.
What survived is a business. What died is a brand people loved.
The escape that isn't
An obvious objection: couldn't a company simply accept being small? Serve enthusiasts profitably without chasing the mainstream?
Bang & Olufsen, the Danish audio manufacturer celebrating its centenary, suggests this path exists. For a hundred years they have produced luxury electronics for wealthy buyers, never pursuing mass-market positioning. Their speakers hang in the Museum of Modern Art. Their commitment to longevity and repairability predates contemporary sustainability discourse by decades.
Yet recent coverage describes shrinking revenues and repeated restructuring. The company faces what analysts call the slow luxury dilemma: products built to last decades limit replacement purchases. Annual turnover hovers around €400 million with roughly a thousand employees—viable, but precarious.
More fundamentally, the luxury path requires conditions smartphones cannot meet. A speaker can remain competitive for a decade; its technology matures slowly. A smartphone must incorporate the latest processor and modem, which requires volume to negotiate competitive component pricing. The capital intensity of mobile hardware makes pure luxury positioning nearly impossible. There is no sustainable equilibrium where a smartphone company serves only enthusiasts.
The lesson that cannot be learned
Return to Carl Pei, standing on stage with the Nothing Phone 3, absorbing criticism that echoes what OnePlus faced in 2019.
Pei built OnePlus. He lived through every compromise. He left explicitly to try again. He cultivated community engagement exceeding anything OnePlus achieved. He designed products that genuinely stood apart.
Nothing reached a billion dollars in cumulative revenue. It became the fastest-growing smartphone brand in multiple markets. And then came flagship pricing, processor compromises, design changes that upset loyalists, and Pei dismissing concerns about affordability by pointing buyers toward cheaper models.
If anyone could break this cycle, it would be the founder who already lived it once. That he cannot suggests the forces involved are not choices but constraints. Not strategy but physics.
What the pattern teaches
The OnePlus trajectory is not a cautionary tale. It is an instruction manual.
Enthusiast brands do not betray their audiences through moral failure. They are subject to market dynamics that operate regardless of intention. Pioneer species prepare ground for competitors. Early-adopter strategies repel mainstream buyers. Hardware economics require volume that niche positioning cannot provide.
The founders who understand this build for transition from day one. Capture enthusiast attention, generate buzz, prove product-market fit—but never mistake the launch audience for the sustainable customer base. The people who love you first are precisely the people who cannot sustain you.
For enthusiasts, the lesson is simpler and perhaps more useful: your favourite brand will leave you. This is not betrayal. This is structure. Enjoy what pioneers build while it exists. Then look for the next one.
Somewhere right now, a small team is designing something that will make people feel how the OnePlus One felt in 2014. It will be extraordinary. It will be unsustainable. And if the founders are fortunate, it will eventually become something else entirely.
The alternative is not survival as they are. The alternative is not surviving at all.