This story was originally published and last updated .
OxygenOS has earned accolades for mostly staying true to Android, but has since developed more of its own personality. This is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it looks strong with Samsung’s One UI. Despite the visual transformation, OnePlus’ skin has not only retained many of its neat features, but some of the recent iterations have also introduced new tricks to make your life a little easier.
We have compiled a list of our favorite features hidden in the various nooks and crannies of OxygenOS.
Swipe up to search apps
With hundreds of apps installed on your phone, using the search bar is by far the fastest way to open the app, but it’s still a multi-step process. OnePlus takes things a step further by introducing a quick gesture that takes you directly to the search bar for the app load. Tidy!
As you swipe to open the app drawer, you hold the second halfway down the middle, and that’s it. The keyboard appears automatically and waits until you start typing in the search bar at the top. It is enabled by default and also works on older OnePlus phones. I can not stress enough how useful and time-saving this feature is.
Screen gestures
It seems that gestures are now completely taking over from our smartphones, but OnePlus still had something in front of them before Google did. In addition to its own version of full-screen navigation gestures, OxygenOS has its much-loved Screen Off gestures. The basic idea is to draw single letters on your phone screen when it is fast, such as turning on the flash or jumping directly to the video recording.
You can even program it to open the app of your choice, but to do so you will need to unlock the phone before the app screen appears. In addition to this, you can also assign each of the letters to open the rear or front camera immediately. In addition to these alphabetical gestures, you get the usual double tap to wake up along with some unique music serving programs. By drawing the pauses (||), forward (>) and backward (<) on the lock screen, you can play / break, to the next track and return to the previous one, in that order. It's a neat way to control music playback, and it works just as well on streaming apps like Spotify as local players.
Go to the Buttons and gestures part of the Institutions app and then click on Quick gestures. This is where you can find the complete list of these handy and intuitive lock screen gestures.
Parallel programs
Having two simultaneous instances of a single app is not something you can activate on any phone, or at least the process of getting there is not very easy. Technically, you can use the same app on different device profiles, but this is often too much hassle for just one or two apps. OnePlus’ OxygenOS is one of the handful of mobile skins that naturally support the feature, and OnePlus calls its version parallel apps. People who use two SIM cards can use it to have WhatsApp accounts with both their phone numbers or to use two instances of an app like Uber.
Among the apps I have installed on my phone, several social media and communication apps are supported, including Twitter, Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp and others. Rental services like Uber and Ola in India are also on the list, along with a local mobile wallet Paytm. The usefulness of parallel apps may vary depending on all the apps you have on your phone, but the most popular apps seem to be supported automatically.
To access your personal list of supported programs, you need to Utilities are on their way Institutions. Once you are there, click on Parallel programs. Now turn on the app you want to duplicate, but be careful if you turn off one of them again: it will erase the data from the parallel instance for good.
Live caption
Live Caption has been extremely useful for those with hearing impairments or just about anyone when it is sometimes not possible to turn up the volume. Pixel phones were a pioneer for the feature, but Google has since opened it up to other OEMs. OnePlus is one of the few that has implemented it so far.
In the volume controls of your phone you will find an extra button to turn on Live Caption when you need it. A live – and accurate – transcript of everything playing on your screen will appear in the middle. It works all over the device and even when the phone is muted. This is one of the handy features that can make you wonder how you ever lived without it.
In landscape mode.
Quick launch
We have all developed muscle memory for the one app that we instinctively use for the moment we unlock our phone. You can reduce the two-step process to a single tap using Quick Launch. With this feature, you select 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 through the list and highlight an app that will then open immediately.
Left and right: Instant start settings, Right: Quick launch in action
This may sound very close to the screen-down gestures we discussed earlier, but Quick Launch differs in a few fundamental ways. First, the latter becomes much more complicated with all your app applications and their shortcuts, so you can jump directly to an in-app feature, such as adding a calendar entry or opening a new incognito tab in Chrome. On top of that, Quick Launch actually feels faster than shielding gestures, which requires two taps for the same job (since the phone has to be unlocked to launch the app).
As you may have guessed, the feature only works on OnePlus phones with a fingerprint reader on the screen, so those using older devices have no luck. To go to the option, go to Utilities in Institutions and click on Quick launch. There you can turn it on and choose from a really long list of apps and shortcuts on your phone.
Quick response in landscape
Messaging programs in particular struggle to adapt to landscape mode, and the keyboard usually takes up most of the vertical space. They are basically useless (and kind of frustrating) that way. However, OxygenOS has a tool that allows you to have a better chat experience if someone interrupts your YouTube video.
If you press reply on a notification banner while in landscape mode, your OnePlus phone will open the chat wire in a mini-cover on the left. To the right appears a more manageable floating keyboard, and it gets even better once you have swipe-enabled. This feature works as expected and is something I would like to see on other phones as well.
OnePlus users can access it from the Utilities part of the Institutions app.
Dark mode scheduling
Dark mode on older OnePlus phones followed a cumbersome process and required you to manually dig deep into the Settings app to make it work. Worse, this complicated process will even confuse 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 adjust your own schedule. If you still want manual control, you can easily add a switch in the quick settings menu.
This new schedule option is available under the screen settings of your phone.
Many recent phones use a dedicated assistant key – an idea that Samsung first distributed to the Bixby voice assistant. But within a few days of using the button, you will find that it is more annoying than helping with all the accidental presses. If you’re one of the weird balls who wants a physical key to summon the Google Assistant, you can do so on your OnePlus phone with a built-in OxygenOS feature on the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro).
Under Buttons and gestures, you will find a switch with which you can hold the on / off key for half a second to open the speech bot. If you turn it on, the power menu will appear at a longer push of three seconds (again, except on OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro devices, which allow you to have just one or the other). Right above this option there is another switch that allows you to double-click the lock button to jump straight into the camera app. It is possible to use both of these features at the same time.
OxygenOS is a jam-packed software sheet that does not impress with all its fun features. In addition to this short list of cherry-picked utilities, OxygenOS has much more. Let us know in the comments if you think we’ve missed something you think should be on the list.
Even more goodies
Updated to include the scratching gesture for searching apps, Live Caption, quick response in landscape mode and scheduling dark mode.
Ryne Hager and Scott Scrivens contributed to this post.