OxygenOS and Realme UI are reportedly being discontinued, with all future OnePlus and Realme phones set to ship with Oppo’s ColorOS instead. The report comes from Smartprix, published on July 3, 2026 and citing an industry insider, and has since been picked up by 9to5Google, Digital Trends and others. To be clear up front: Oppo, OnePlus and Realme have not confirmed any of this. Treat it as a credible report, not an announcement. But the direction of travel it describes is real, and it deserves scrutiny from the people who actually buy these phones.
What the report actually says
According to Smartprix, Oppo plans to retire both OxygenOS (OnePlus) and Realme UI “in the coming months”, moving every future OnePlus and Realme device globally onto a single ColorOS build. The stated motivation, per the report, is cost: maintaining three separate Android skins takes serious engineering money, and Oppo wants to consolidate. The same report describes a wider restructuring — OnePlus narrowing its focus to India and China, and Realme winding down its China business to concentrate on international markets. None of these claims carries an official statement, a firm date, or any word on what happens to phones already in people’s hands.
The history: this ending was written in 2021
Some context matters here, because “OnePlus phones switching to ColorOS” is less of a cliff-edge than it sounds:
- March 2021: OnePlus phones in China dropped their local HydrogenOS and moved to ColorOS outright.
- July 2021: OnePlus founder Pete Lau announced that OnePlus and Oppo would merge their software codebases. From OxygenOS 12 onwards, OxygenOS has effectively been a reskinned fork of ColorOS — a move that drew heavy backlash from the community at the time, along with famously buggy early builds.
- Realme UI has been built on ColorOS since day one in 2020; it was always a theme layer more than a separate operating system.
So what’s reportedly ending is not the software itself — that largely converged five years ago — but the last remaining layer of differentiation, and the two brand names attached to it.
Opinion: buyers lose more than a logo on a boot screen
What follows is our opinion, based on the facts above.
Oppo’s likely reasoning is not crazy. One codebase means fewer teams duplicating work, and in theory faster, more consistent updates across three brands — Samsung runs one skin across its entire range and nobody complains. If unification genuinely speeds up Android version rollouts for OnePlus and Realme phones, that is a real benefit.
But look at it from the side of the person who paid for the phone. OnePlus built its brand — especially in India — on the promise that its software was different: clean, fast, close to stock, free of the clutter that defined budget Chinese skins. People paid a premium over equivalent Oppo and Realme hardware substantially for that promise. After the 2021 merger, OnePlus repeatedly reassured users that OxygenOS would stay light and “burdenless”. If this report holds, that reassurance turns out to have been a five-year decommissioning schedule. That is a trust problem, and trust is the one thing an update policy can’t patch.
There are practical worries too. ColorOS as shipped on Oppo and Realme phones — particularly budget models sold in India — has a documented pattern of preinstalled third-party apps, promotional notifications and “recommendations” baked into system apps. OxygenOS on flagships has largely been spared the worst of it. A single unified build raises an obvious question nobody has answered: does everyone get the clean flagship treatment, or does the ad-supported treatment become the default? Oppo’s cost-cutting motive, as reported, does not suggest the expensive answer.
Existing owners are the other open question. The report says nothing about whether current OnePlus and Realme phones will be migrated to ColorOS branding mid-lifecycle, and a forced mid-life skin swap has historically gone badly — ask anyone who lived through the OxygenOS 12 rollout. At minimum, buyers deserve a clear statement on whether promised update commitments (four years of OS updates on recent OnePlus flagships) survive the transition intact.
What to watch next
Until Oppo, OnePlus or Realme comment, this remains an unconfirmed — if well-sourced and widely echoed — report. The tells to watch: whether the next OnePlus flagship ships with “OxygenOS” branding at all, and whether Realme’s next big launch in India, following the recent Oppo Reno 16 series, quietly says “ColorOS” on the spec sheet. If the names disappear, expect the companies to frame it as an upgrade. Whether it feels like one will depend on how much of ColorOS’s baggage comes along.
Sources: Smartprix, 9to5Google, Digital Trends
