Hours after the launch of its latest model OnePlus 5, phone manufacturing company OnePlus has been accused of inflating benchmark scores on apps such as Geekbench 4, Antutu and Androbench.

This is not the first time OnePlus is facing allegations of manipulating scores on benchmark apps. When the company launched its flagship OnePlus 3T in February this year, it had been accused of manipulating its ROM behaviour in a way that when detected on a benchmark app, it would alter the results.

According to a report in XDA Developers, OnePlus 5 units are programmed with a code that allows the phone to manipulate test results. The code helps OnePlus achieve high Geekbench 4 scores for Snapdragon 835. However, when it was tested on a hidden build of Geekbench 4, the results were much lower. OnePlus 5 was reported to have scored 6,700 in multi-core performance on the Google PlayStore version of Geekbench, the report said. But the smartphone did not manage to score even 6,500 when it was tested on the hidden build of the app.

Under performance governors, the minimum frequency of the device jumps to 1.9 GHz – its maximum capacity. When the cheating mechanism was disabled, the maximum frequency was achieved only 24.4% of readings. However, when the mechanism was enabled, 95% of its readiness were in maximum frequency state, the report added.

The cheating mechanism is “blatant” and aimed at “maximising performance”, XDA Developers said.

OnePlus responds:

Denying the claims made by XDA Developers, OnePlus said they had allowd the benchmark apps to run in a state similar to daily usage because they wanted to display the performance potential of the device. “We have allowed benchmark apps to run in a state similar to daily usage, including the running of resource intensive apps and games,” it said, according to Digit. “Additionally when launching apps the OnePlus 5 runs at a similar state in order to increase the speed in which apps open. We are not overclocking the device, rather we are displaying the performance potential of the OnePlus 5.”