OnePlus 9 Pro Update

I loved this phone when I bought it, even with its quirks in the software. I hadn't owned a OnePlus device since the OnePlus One, which had a ton of software flaws and turned me off of OP phones until now. When OP announced their cameras were in collaboration with Hasselblad, I was intrigued. I wanted a phone with a good camera.

Everything was going great until it was finally time to upgrade to Android 12. Unfortunately, this did not go smoothly. OP and Oppo merged, which meant that OxygenOS was becoming ColorOS. Along with the A12 update, it turned into a disaster. 

3 months after updating to A12, the issues I was having still weren't being addressed and I was running very low on patience.

1. No more 5G/VoLTE/VoWifi. This one is huge. How can they let an update go for 3 months without a phone having access to the stuff it did in A11?

2. Always on Display doesn't stay on. (It's literally in the name, dudes.) I use my phone as a clock/alarm, and having to tap the screen to find out the time was irritating. But also, if my alarm went off and the screen wasn't on, I'd have to hunt for the alarm under notifications and turn it off manually. And then my Google Routines wouldn't run.

3. No more Visual Voicemail. T-Mobile has a nice service that will give you voice-to-text voicemails and access to look and save them and re-read them, if you pay $4 a month. It's pretty sweet and super handy. But after the update not only did voice-to-text stop working, but voicemails stopped showing up in the app completely. I messaged the developer about it but got nothing back from them. I wasn't going to pay $4 a month for a app that doesn't work.

There were other more weird, random annoyances like the fact that after a couple of days, the ability to log into my phone with the fingerprint would competely go away unless I rebooted my phone. And when I rebooted, I would have to re-inable auto-rotate every time. And other times when my screen waking just wouldn't respond at all.

Oh I'm settling. So hard.

I posted these 3 main issues in OP Feedback, but they wanted me to do a screenshot video of the issue and some other weird stuff, and it just irritated me more, because 2 of the 3 issues I would not be able to do this. How do you expect me to video record my phone turning off its Always on Display after a random 4 hours in the middle of the night and then what - screenshot the off screen?? Like, are you serious? They were sending me canned responses without even reading about my issue first. So instead of trying to go through that trouble, I said screw it, and reinstalled Android 11.

I finally have a fully functioning phone again. It's unfortunate that I lose out on critical security updates. I'll try Android 12 again maybe in a few months. In fact, I think they've stopped pushing it out to phones due to all the issues, so maybe it'll be a few months before I get the update again. 

I had to factory reset my phone in order to downgrade it, which is a hassle in itself. But fair warning - if you have a 2-factor authentecator app - MAKE SURE YOU EXPORT EVERYTHING BEFORE WIPING YOUR PHONE.

Google Authentecator has an option to export/import your stuff, which I had no idea even existed, and I didn't even think that I needed to backup this stuff, but of course you do. There is literally no way to get all your old 2-factors back, and I had a whole page of stuff - some of it for work even. I was even locked out of the Bitwarden (my password manager!!) webpage without it. I was still able to access the browser application, which was crucial for work passwords, but basically the only way to "fix" the website problem was to delete my account and start over. Luckily, using the browser app, I was able to export all the passwords to my desktop and reload them to the new account. But without recovery passwords I have no access to any of my 2-factor unless it has a backup text option. And I don't even remember who all I had them set up for so I will be discovering them for a while, I'm sure.

Don't make the same mistake I did. >_<