‘ about a new OnePlus phone set to come out this summer. The OnePlus 5, unsurprisingly, will be the follow-up to the OnePlus 3T, and the specs won’t be surprising for a 2017 flagship Android smartphone.
Provided that the price is in line with OnePlus’s previous smartphones — that is, a little less than the competition — we’re expecting it to sell just as well as OnePlus’s previous hit phones. But even though we don’t technically know when the OnePlus 5 is coming or what it’ll look like, we already know that OnePlus will have an incentive program in place.
In a forum post on Friday, a OnePlus staff member laid out the details for a new referral program. In short, anyone who buys a OnePlus phone (or has bought one in the past) gets a promo code, which they can give out to friends or share on social. If anyone uses that code to then buy a new OnePlus phone, they get $30 in credit for accessories. When your promo code gets used, you get points that also count towards accessories.
It’s not quite as good as the referral programs that Uber and Lyft have made popular for new riders, but it’s still a good freebie. Far more importantly, it virtually guarantees that everyone can get a free case with their new OnePlus 5.
In a lot of ways, it’s also a hint that OnePlus is returning to its roots: cheap phones and word-of-mouth marketing, rather than trying to take on Samsung head-on. When the first OnePlus phone came out, you needed an invite code to even be able to buy one. The artificial scarcity made the phone even more popular, and helped build OnePlus’s reputation.
This latest promo isn’t quite as virally exclusive, but it’s still a noble attempt by OnePlus to tap into the company’s most valuable resource: the fans.
