Earlier this week we reported on the OnePlus 5"s strange screen issue, which the company called a "deliberate engineering decision" by their manufacturers. After some digging, the reason why this decision was made was finally uncovered.
A Reddit user named Tassadar did a teardown of the device and found several interesting things amidst their research. The OnePlus 5 follows a very similar design language to the iPhone 7, including the layout of the camera, antennae lines and so forth. What the researchers found, was that the current OnePlus device, used the same display as the 3T model; however, the display didn"t allow the camera and antennae layouts to be at their current positions. So instead of ordering displays that would fit, OnePlus decided that it would be better to invert the display.
Since then, the device has suffered from a strange "jelly" scrolling effect that can be replicated on any device by rotating it 180 degrees as reported by XDA Developers after several users tested this on a myriad of devices, however, no specifications were provided. OnePlus have stated that it only affected a small number of users, and that affected customers could return their devices for repair but noted that they couldn"t guarantee that it would be fixed.
From the research done, it was noted that based on the hardware layout, no software fix would solve the issue.