The freshness of the new technology is fascinating, and the euphoria when you buy a new phone out of the box is extraordinary. The rich out-of-the-box experience of OnePlus phones brings its excitement factor close to the top of the industry. Luckily, when you buy a phone from OnePlus, the good stuff isn’t over yet.
You can make some improvements and small tweaks in OxygenOS that will drastically change the way you use your OnePlus phone and make it even better. In this guide, we have eight tips that you should use when setting up your OnePlus phone.
1. Configure or Disable the Shelf
The Shelf plugin has been iterated in OxygenOS several times, but it’s only after the company’s Oppoization that it really came under fire. Although it does have useful widgets like a step tracker and quick notes, the way you access it can annoy most users.
Every time you swipe down from the right side of the status bar, the OnePlus Shelf pops up, often with a jittery animation. You can obviously choose to get used to this gesture, but many prefer the default action in Android, which is the drop-down notification panel.
Fortunately, you can disable the shelf feature on your OnePlus device:
1. Swipe down to access the OnePlus Shelf.
2. Tap the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the screen.
3. Tap the launcher toggle to disable it.
Alternatively, you can play with the options here and rearrange the bookshelves into your preferred configuration. You can enable first-party data cards that display weather, storage, and data information, or simply add common gadgets to access them faster.
2. Enable off-screen gestures
Off-screen gestures are one of the first additions that OnePlus introduced in its stock feel OxygenOS. Playing or pausing music, skipping tracks, and switching flashlights without having to turn on your phone’s screen is something that most OnePlus users take for granted.
If you’ve never used off-screen gestures, you can enable them by navigating to Settings > System Settings > Gestures and Actions > Screen off gestures. In addition to the popular gestures that we just mentioned, you can also assign app shortcuts to other gestures.
3. Uninstall the bloat software
Don’t worry, your new OnePlus phone doesn’t have any bloated software, at least not in the traditional sense. After years of avoiding selling phones with pre-installed third-party apps or games, OnePlus now comes with some of its own apps for them.
These include OnePlus Notes, games, communities, stores, and a few other apps. These applications, although largely unnecessary, are not half a disadvantage. If you find yourself spending money on OnePlus products on a regular basis, the store app may make a lot of sense for your phone installation. The same goes for other apps, such as clone phones and weather.
Fortunately, all of these apps are easy to uninstall, and if you never use them, we recommend you to do so because first-party manufacturer apps have a tendency to clog system resources.
4. Enable Optimized Charging
Since almost every OnePlus phone comes with a crazy fast charging feature, few people will find it necessary to plug in their phones before going to bed. Old habits are hard to change, and if you prefer to wake up with a fully charged phone, enabling a switch in the battery settings to optimize night charging may be in your best interest.
Every time you charge your phone to 100%, it completes a cycle and loses its capacity slightly. While plugging in for a long time is no longer a concern, charging your phone overnight is still not good. The optimized charging feature stops charging at around 80% throughout the night and resumes to 100% before you wake up.
It usually takes a few days to a week for your phone to adjust to your sleep schedule and get the feature to work. If you regularly put your phone on a wireless charger before bedtime, this feature will definitely promote battery health in the long run.
5. Set up a OnePlus account
In case you’ve decided to stick with the “bloatware” that OnePlus bundles with its phones, you might want to create a OnePlus account for yourself. You can do this by navigating to Settings > Users & accounts > OnePlus Account.
The benefits of doing so include being able to interact with community posts in the Community app, syncing notes, and saving photos and videos to the cloud. OnePlus also offers a Red Cable Club program where you can redeem virtual coins to avail vouchers and other freebies.
6. Set the privacy feature
Recently, as Android has redoubled its focus on privacy, some OEMs, including OnePlus, have begun to roll out privacy-oriented features such as hidden spaces, vaults, and app locks. Previous versions of OxygenOS have always had these features, but OnePlus nested all the privacy features in a more streamlined way in OxygenOS 12.
7. Customize Dark Mode Levels
Most OnePlus phones have an AMOLED display with vivid colors and deep blacks, and the best way to get the most out of it is to switch to dark mode.
For phones running OxygenOS 12, you can further customize the dark mode, choosing between three different black levels. If you don’t like pitch black mode, you can choose a lighter gray or something in between.
You can play with other options such as adjusting wallpapers and icons to fit dark mode or enabling adaptive contrast under the Dark Mode settings of the Settings app.
8. Adjust the animation speed of the application
There’s a good chance that you picked up a OnePlus phone because of its reputation for being incredibly fast and snappy. That still holds true for all the phones across the company’s lineup, but there’s a way to make them feel even snappier.
You can adjust the speed of opening and closing animations for applications under Home and lock screen > Application animation speed in the Settings >.
Adjust your phone to suit your needs
OxygenOS’ myriad features make it so flexible. Over the years, OnePlus phones have evolved from offering the same rewriting software experience as Nexus and Pixel devices to several convenient features that now come to the fore that stand out.
