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OxygenOS has been praised for remaining mostly loyal to the stock Android, but has since developed its own personality more. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, although it looks a lot like Samsung’s One UI. Despite the visual transformation, OnePlus’ skin has not only retained many of its cool little features, but some of its recent iterations have also introduced new tricks to make your life a little easier.
We have put together a list of our favorite features that are hidden in the various nooks and crannies of OxygenOS.
Swipe up to find apps
With hundreds of apps installed on your phone, using the search bar is by far the fastest way to open the one you want, but it’s still a multi-step process. OnePlus takes it a step further by including a quick gesture that takes you directly to the app drawer search bar. Cared for!
While swiping up to open the app drawer, hold it halfway for a split second, and that’s it. The keyboard will appear automatically, waiting for you to start typing in the search bar at the top. It’s on by default and works on older OnePlus phones as well. I cannot stress enough how useful and time-saving this feature is.
Hide gestures
Gestures seem to be completely invading our smartphones now, but OnePlus had something going for them long before Google. Along with its own version of full screen navigation gestures, OxygenOS has its popular screen-off gestures. The basic idea is to draw single-stroke letters on your phone’s screen when it’s off to perform a quick action like turn on the flashlight or jump straight to video recording.
You can even schedule it to open the app you want, although that does require you to unlock the phone before the app screen appears. Besides that, you can also assign each of the letters to immediately open the rear or front camera. Apart from those alphabetical gestures, you get the usual double tap to wake up with unique music controls. Drawing the pause (||), forward (>), and backward (<) icons on the closed screen will allow you to play / pause, skip to the next track, and return to the previous one, in that order. It's an efficient way to control music playback, and it works just as well on streaming apps like Spotify as it does on local players.
Head to the Buttons and gestures section of the Settings app, then click Quick gestures. This is where you’ll find the full list of these handy and intuitive gestures on the lock screen.
Parallel applications
Having two simultaneous instances of a single app isn’t something you can activate on just any phone, or at least the process of getting there isn’t particularly easy. Technically, you can use the same app on different device profiles, but it’s often too complicated for one or two apps. OnePlus’ OxygenOS is among the few mobile skins that natively support the feature, and OnePlus calls its version of parallel apps. People using two SIM cards could use it to have WhatsApp accounts with their two phone numbers or run two instances of an app like Uber.
Among the apps I have installed on my phone, there are several social media and communication apps that are supported including Twitter, Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp and others. Taxi services like Uber and Ola in India are also on the list, along with a local Paytm mobile wallet. The usefulness of parallel apps may vary depending on all the apps you have on your phone, but it looks like the most popular are supported by default.
To access your personalized list of supported applications, you must click on the button Utilities move inward Settings. Once there, click on Parallel applications. Now activate the app you want to duplicate, but be careful when you deactivate any of them – it will permanently erase the data of the parallel instance.
Live legend
Live Caption has been extremely useful for those with hearing problems or just about anyone on the occasion when increasing the volume is not an option. Pixel phones pioneered this feature, but Google has since opened it up to other OEMs. OnePlus is one of the very few to have implemented it so far.
In the volume controls of your phone, you will find an additional button to activate Live Caption whenever you need it. A live – and accurate – transcript of whatever is playing on your screen will appear in the center. It works across the device and even when the phone is turned off. This is one of those handy features that will make you wonder how you ever got along without it.
In landscape mode.
Quick Start
We have all developed muscle memory for this app that we instinctively navigate the moment we unlock our phone. You can reduce this two-step process to just one click using Quick Launch. This feature allows you to choose a small list of apps (or even app shortcuts) that you use frequently and display them on the lock screen when you keep pressing the fingerprint reader. You can scroll down and highlight an app, which will then open instantly.
Left and center: Quick launch settings, Law: Quick launch in action
It might sound very close to the screen-off gestures we talked about earlier, but the Quick Launch differs in several basic ways. On the one hand, the latter becomes much more complex with all the apps on your device and their shortcuts, allowing you to jump directly to a function built into the app, such as adding a calendar entry or opening it. a new incognito tab in Chrome. Plus, the quick launch is actually faster than screen-off gestures, which require two taps for the same job (because the phone must be unlocked to launch the app).
As you might have guessed, the feature only works on OnePlus phones with a built-in fingerprint reader, so those using older devices are out of luck. To access the option, go to Utilities in Settings and click on Quick Start. There you can activate it and choose from a really long list of apps and shortcuts on your phone.
Quick response in landscape mode
Messaging apps, in particular, struggle to adapt to landscape mode, with the keyboard often taking up most of the vertical space. They are basically unusable (and rather frustrating) that way. However, OxygenOS has a tool that you can use to have a better chat experience when someone interrupts your YouTube video.
When you tap Reply on a landscape notification banner, your OnePlus phone opens the chat thread in a mini overlay on the left. A more manageable floating keyboard appears on the right, and it’s even better if you’ve enabled swipe typing. This feature works as expected and is something I would love to see on other phones as well.
OnePlus users can activate it from Utilities section of the Settings app.
Programming in dark mode
Dark mode on older OnePlus phones went through a tedious process, requiring you to manually dig deep into the Settings app to make it work. Worse, this convoluted process would ruin even your custom theme.
Fortunately, the latest version of OxygenOS has added a much needed and much more convenient scheduling feature. You can now set the dark mode to turn on automatically after sunset or insert your own custom schedule. If you still want manual control, you can easily add a toggle in the quick settings menu.
This new scheduling option is available in your phone’s display settings.
Many recent phones adopt a dedicated Assistant key – an idea initially widely peddled by Samsung for its Bixby voice assistant. But a few days after using the button, you will find that it is more annoying than helpful with all the accidental presses. If you’re one of those weirdos who would love to have a physical key to invoke the Google Assistant, you can do it on your OnePlus phone using a built-in OxygenOS feature (note: the Assistant launches by default with the power key on the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro).
Under Buttons and gestures, you will find a toggle that allows you to hold the power key for half a second to open the voice bot. If you enable this option, the power menu will appear on a longer press for three seconds (again, except on OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro devices, which simply allow you to have one or the other) . Right above that option, there’s another toggle that lets you double-click the lock key to go directly to the camera app. It is possible to use these two functions simultaneously.
OxygenOS is a packed software skin that doesn’t fail to impress with all of its fun little features. Beyond this short list of handpicked utilities, OxygenOS has many other benefits. If you think we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments.
Even more goodies
Updated to include swipe up gesture for app search, live captions, landscape mode fast response, and dark mode schedule.
Ryne Hager and Scott Scrivens contributed to this article.
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