I’ve had my OnePlus Open since it launched in 2023, and I’ll be honest: I don’t use it as often as I thought I would. The company’s next iteration, the Open 2, was put on pause, leaving the original feeling like a one-off. And the software, while capable, hasn’t given me much reason to stick around. Then Oxygen OS 16 dropped and I just installed it. A few things in it changed the way I use the phone, now, so I might stick around a bit longer. Here’s what kept me interested.
I found 3 Android features so useful I’m confused why they ship disabled
Why aren’t these already on?
Home screen resizing gives me more control than I had before
One phone, two screen sizes, one layout system that handles both
The new OxygenOS 16 lets you resize icons and folders right on the home screen using a drag handle. It also lets you scale the dock up to five apps. The Flux icon pack also auto-themes your icons system-wide to match your wallpaper colors, so the whole home screen stays visually coherent without manual tweaking.
Worth knowing: resizing a folder on one screen changes it on both, so you’re not getting fully independent layouts per display. What you are getting is much finer control over your home screen than OxygenOS 15 offered. On the Open’s large inner display, being able to scale icons up makes it feel more expansive and productive. That’s a real consideration when buying a foldable, and OxygenOS 16 handles it better than its predecessor did.
App Lock lets me hand over the Open without handing over everything
One long-press to put an app behind authentication
OxygenOS 16 adds App Lock directly to the home screen long-press menu. Hold an app icon and you’ll see the option to lock it, which puts it behind your fingerprint or PIN before it opens. It’s not a new concept, but having it this accessible without digging through Settings is.
On a foldable, this makes even more sense. The whole idea is that the inner display is large enough to actually share, whether you’re showing photos, pulling up a map, or handing it off to a kid for YouTube. App Lock means I can easily lock apps on the fly without having to plan ahead. Locking a banking app or an app that you don’t want your child accessing is pretty easy, and is one of my favorite new privacy features on the Open.
Parallel Processing 2.0 makes the Open feel like a different phone
Animations that don’t make you wait
OxygenOS 15 introduced parallel processing for home screen animations. OxygenOS 16 extends the feature system-wide to features like the three-button navigation system, the Shelf, the app drawer, and the notification shade. They can all run animations concurrently now instead of lining them up sequentially. Parallel Processing 2.0 means that a second animation can start before the first finishes, so you don’t notice any delay when you tap quickly through the UI.
On a foldable with a lot of UI surface area to cover, this matters more than it would on a regular phone. Switching between split-screen apps, unfolding mid-task, or bouncing between the cover screen and inner display all felt slightly laggy before. After OxygenOS 16, those transitions are noticeably snappier. It’s one of those changes you won’t find in a benchmark, but it feels more obvious when using the phone, the kind of thing the best Android phones have learned to prioritize.
OxygenOS 16 makes O+ Connect worth actually using
Cross-device file search is the upgrade O+ Connect needed
O+ Connect isn’t new to OxygenOS 16, as clipboard sync and screen mirroring between the Open and a Windows or macOS PC existed before. What OxygenOS 16 adds is cross-device file search, letting you search files across your phone and PC simultaneously with a single search. Clipboard sync with Mac also gets a proper native implementation here; it previously required workarounds or third-party apps to reliably push text between the two.
The clipboard sync was already a godsend for copying text from the Open to my Mac or PC for article work, and the cross-device search makes the connection feel more like a proper ecosystem than a file transfer utility. For a foldable that pulls double duty as a productivity device, having that tighter PC integration is genuinely useful, even if some of it predates this update.
Live Space puts at-a-glance info where I can actually see it
The lock screen finally does something useful
OxygenOS 16.1 puts a pill-shaped capsule at the bottom of the lock screen called Live Space (think Apple’s Dynamic Island but relocated from the notch to the bottom of the screen). It surfaces real-time info, like timers, music controls, navigation directions, and delivery tracking, without needing you to unlock the phone. Tapping the capsule expands it into a full notification. The new update, which started rolling out in May 2026, expanded it further to include ongoing calls, flashlight toggles, and recorder status inside the capsule.
I’m still on OxygenOS 16.0.3 on my Open, so Live Space hasn’t landed yet. But glancing at the cover screen for a Doordash ETA or a track name without unlocking or unfolding is exactly the kind of friction reduction that makes a foldable worth carrying. Samsung and Apple already have versions of this; OnePlus is catching up, so I’m watching for the update.
Still holding out for an Open 2
OxygenOS 16 didn’t fix everything, of course. The OnePlus Open is still running 2023 hardware, the Open 2 has been put on hold with no clear timeline, and the camera system shows its age against 2025 flagships (though it’s still pretty great). But software can buy time, and OxygenOS 16 bought OnePlus quite a bit of it on my end. I’m sticking with the Open for now.