OxygenOS 16 is the latest major OS release from OnePlus. Built on top of the new Android 16 base operating system, OxygenOS 16 is an evolution of the ideas introduced with OxygenOS 15, including parallel processing for UI animations, new AI functionality, and improved interconnectivity with other platforms.
We had a chance to test the beta version of the OS on the OnePlus 13s ahead of launch, but these observations should apply to the final version on other devices as well.
Design
Starting with the theme of ‘evolutionary, not revolutionary’ we have the design. The differences from OxygenOS 15 are subtle, requiring a second glance, or even a third, to spot.
For starters, a handful of app icons are different. This includes the likes of Clock, Camera, and Settings. At least these are the ones you’ll notice, as others like Calculator, Weather, and My Files are so subtly different that you’d need to bust out the magnifying glass.
OxygenOS 16 • OxygenOS 15
Speaking of apps, there is also a new app drawer now. You can switch between an all-app view and iOS-style categorization, and you can easily switch between the two by swiping sideways. The search bar has been moved to a more convenient location at the bottom.
App drawer
The homescreen and lockscreen now feature added customizability. Folders on the homescreen have three different layouts that vary in look, but also in how many apps you can launch without opening the folder. App icons can now be expanded to take up more space; the user is free to switch from 1×1, 1×2, 2×1, or 2×2 sizes for them. In 2×2 mode, you can also assign additional functions to the icon from the app.
On the OnePlus 13s that we tested on, you can now also pick a new 5×7 grid layout for the homescreen icons alongside the previous 4×6 and 5×6 options. Also, if you hide the icon names, you can pick from 4×7 or a new 5×9 grid. These options could potentially be different on other devices.
Homescreen
The lockscreen probably sees the biggest visual change on the system, provided you customize it. OxygenOS 16 comes with a fantastic set of new clocks and visual effects to jazz up your lockscreen, and the OS makes great use of machine learning to carefully place on-screen elements behind key parts of your wallpaper for a three-dimensional effect. You can also use videos or live photos as wallpaper to create an even more striking effect.
Along with the various clock and text items, you can now also place widgets on the lockscreen, so you can glance at information or launch specific app functions without having to get to the homescreen first.
Lockscreen
Finally, you can also have the lockscreen be your always-on display, but in a dimmed state. However, the term ‘always-on’ is used loosely here, as this screen does not stay on for longer than a few seconds, and there is no way to keep it enabled permanently.
Unfortunately, the lockscreen customization in OxygenOS 16 has the same limitation as before, which is that the options you have available are limited to that specific theme. Certain themes will offer you the big clocks, but others don’t, and there’s no way to just put whatever you want on screen regardless of your base theme. If you never dig into the Flux themes menu, you might not even see some of the cooler customization options that the OS has to offer, simply because they aren’t present on the default theme.
As a side note, you can now enter lockscreen customizability directly from the homescreen, without having to dig through the settings first, which is great when you quickly want to change the look of your phone.
The Quick Settings are now more customizable if you use the Split view. You can now even move or get rid of system tiles, such as the brightness and volume bar, and replace them with something else. There are more tiles available now to choose from, so you can have exactly the things you want with no fixed items.
Quick settings
OxygenOS 16 also has a new swipe animation for navigation gestures, but it is in beta for some reason and disabled by default. You need to go to Settings > System & update > System navigation and then scroll all the way to the bottom to enable it. Once enabled, you get an iOS-style swipe animation when you swipe in from the edge to go back. Instead of just executing the back swipe function, this feature lets you gradually slide back the current screen and peek at the previous screen, or even cancel the gesture by reversing the motion. We just kept it on, and the UI felt noticeably more fluid as a result.
New swipe animation
The last major aspect of the visual upgrade is all the little bits of Liquid Glass elements peppered throughout the OS. You knew it was coming, and that it was only a matter of time before Android OEMs upended their entire design language to make their software look like iOS 26, so this really shouldn’t be a surprise. In OxygenOS 16, OnePlus has limited its use to select items, such as the digits in the Calculator app or the passcode screen, the buttons on the lockscreen, and the Close button in the task manager. It’s not clear if this is done to keep the influence subtle or because there was simply no time to integrate it into more places before release.
As you can probably imagine, it looks out of place considering the design language of OxygenOS 16 has nothing in common with iOS 26, which was built from the ground up to be used with Liquid Glass. Nor is the effect done as well as Apple’s GPU-intensive theatrics. The only good glass effect in OxygenOS 16 is the new charging animation, which is quite striking.
Liquid Glass inspired elements
You can probably expect more Liquid Glass encroachment in future versions of OxygenOS, or even other Android skins, for that matter. Frankly, we’d be surprised if that didn’t turn out to be the case.
Animations
While fundamentally an aspect of the design, the animations on OxygenOS 16 do deserve their own section.
With OxygenOS 15, OnePlus introduced the concept of parallel processing for the homescreen animations, which allowed them to run independently of one another in separate processes. A user could thus trigger an animation and then another one in quick succession, and the second animation would play out immediately without having to wait for the first one to finish.
At the time this was released, the effect seemed subtle at best, especially considering how performance-optimized animations in OxygenOS were to begin with. However, over time, we have come to appreciate them more, especially when switching to another device.
With OxygenOS 16, OnePlus is bringing parallel processing to a lot more instances within the UI. OnePlus is calling this Parallel Processing 2.0, and it is now available for the three-button navigation, the Shelf, app drawer, and more. OnePlus is also introducing a new animation technology called Flow Motion that is all about the transitions between different parts of the UI and applications.
The obvious place you see this is with the new lockscreen. Once again, you need to switch to one of the nice themes, but once done, you will be greeted with stunning animations where the wallpaper and items on the lockscreen gracefully transition to the homescreen. It helped that our OnePlus 13s was able to execute these transitions without missing a beat at the full 120Hz, but it would be interesting to see how well they work and if they are even available at all on lower-end Nord devices.
But even outside of the more obvious places, OxygenOS 16 glides like an adroit figure skater on ice. There is no friction or hesitation seen anywhere, and it feels like your phone sneakily got its refresh rate bumped up even beyond 120Hz. We can’t wait to see how this looks on the purported 165Hz of the OnePlus 15, where the icons would likely just slide off the screen. That is assuming OnePlus actually lets the users access the full 165Hz outside of select apps and games.
Apps
OxygenOS 16 has mostly the same apps as its predecessor. Moreover, most of them also look and work the same, so you are not going to feel much of a change once you go past the icon.
There are a few new apps here. OnePlus has finally added a Compass, which is handy. The old Games app has been replaced with a new Game Assistant, which mostly works the same but has an overly gamery aesthetic that’s a bit tacky. Finally, there is a Videos app as seen on Oppo and Realme phones. It plays local video but really just exists to serve you more video content and ads.
New apps
Did we really need more system-level apps that cannot easily be uninstalled? Probably not. Is OnePlus going to do something about the fact that there are now two contact apps, two file managers, two photo galleries, two browsers, and two app stores? Definitely not.
Connectivity
OxygenOS 16 also brings with it improved cross-platform connectivity. A lot of the features here, such as being able to connect to and control your tablet or PC from the phone, are available. Similarly, the O+ Connect app for Mac and Windows also allows accessing the files on the phone through your PC. It’s just that these options are now presented in a much more elegant way on the phone within the Device Connect menu.
OnePlus has been pushing for better connectivity with Apple products for a few years now. Part of that is the O+ Connect app for the Mac, as mentioned above. The other part is installing the iOS equivalent of that app on an iPhone and being able to share content with a OnePlus phone with the familiar bumping of the top of the phones.
Connectivity options
The latest effort in this one-sided love affair with Apple is being able to connect your Apple Watch with a OnePlus phone. Yes, you read that right; you can now connect an Apple Watch with a OnePlus phone and receive notifications, messages, and calls on the watch from your OnePlus phone. Additionally, you will also be able to sync your workout records, remotely control the phone’s camera, and use the ‘Find My Phone’ feature to make the phone ring. All of this can be done by installing the OHealth app on the watch.
Unfortunately, as eager as we were to try this feature, we did not have an Apple Watch handy at the time of writing. This leaves us with a few questions, such as how well the feature works, if you still need to have an iPhone around, and what happens when Apple eventually finds out about this and takes a hatchet to the OnePlus workaround with a well-placed software update that disables this functionality entirely.
Image source: OnePlus
All we can say for now is don’t make any purchases based on the promise of this feature. It’s one Hail Mary of a gamble from OnePlus with rather bleak chances of survival.
OnePlus AI
It’s 2025, and your toaster has AI. So, naturally, the major software release from a smartphone brand is going to have some new AI features as well.
Despite being a major part of this year’s update, the AI features in OxygenOS 16 aren’t all new, as some of them were announced last year with OxygenOS 15 and several others came earlier this year with the OnePlus 13s.
One such feature is Mind Space, which can be activated with the Plus Key on the side of the 13s, Nord 5, and future devices like the OnePlus 15. It was initially just a smart screenshot utility, which would scan the image, parsing for information, and also doing other functions such as translating any foreign language text within. This also allowed the information within to be searched using text or voice.
Mind Space
OnePlus has now integrated Mind Space with Google Gemini in OxygenOS 16. Once you do the quick setup process, Gemini can access information saved within Mind Space. You can just ask Gemini to, say, create an itinerary based on the screenshots within Mind Space. For Mind Space users who also use Gemini, this can be quite useful, especially since you can dump a bunch of content in Mind Space (which now also includes voice notes activated by long pressing the Plus Key) and then have Gemini make sense of it all.
One of the new features for this year is AI Writer. The feature can be accessed from almost anywhere you can type and can generate text for you based on prompts. It can also proofread any existing text you may have typed or change its tone.
AI Writer
Next is AI Recorder, which provides real-time transcriptions for recordings and also identifies speakers. Afterwards, it can also generate a summary for you.
The camera gets three new AI features. First is AI Scan, which shows up as a photography mode. It can detect text on screen and frame it correctly, even if it’s crooked or at an angle, making capturing documents easy. Then there are AI Portrait Glow and AI Perfect Shot. The former improves the appearance of faces and skin tones in low-light portraits, and the effect can be quite striking and appealing based on the shot. AI Perfect Shot fixes closed eyes and awkward expressions using face substitutions based on previous shots, but this is one of those ‘kinda creepy even if potentially useful’ features.
AI editing
The good thing with OxygenOS 16 is that all the built-in AI features are now conveniently located inside a special AI menu within the Settings app, so you don’t have to hunt around to find them. This excludes the camera-related features, which can only be found within the Photos app.
OnePlus is also working on more experimental AI features, but those are available through an optional app called AI PlayLab. For now, it includes features such as YumSee, which can generate images to help with text-only restaurant menus, Party Up, which generates videos from a single image, and PhotoSpell, which can edit photos using voice prompts.
Conclusion
This early look at OxygenOS 16 on the OnePlus 13s allowed us to get a fairly good idea of where OnePlus software is heading into 2026.
There is a lot of focus on AI, as you’d more or less expect at this point. But as it was with OxygenOS 15, the AI features here still largely fall within the genuinely useful category, with the company saving the more gimmicky stuff for a separate app. It’s also not particularly in-your-face, and can just be switched off if not required.
The improvements to cross-platform connectivity are also appreciated, especially with desktop platforms. The Apple Watch connectivity is a rather bold step, but we will just have to wait and see how that pans out.
What impressed us the most is the sheer fluidity of the software that is enabled by the new system-level optimizations and new transition animations. This is easily the slickest we have seen elements glide on a screen, and genuinely gets us excited for even faster hardware coming from the company in the future, where it would absolutely shine. And as an aside, even though this was just beta software, it was perfectly stable in our use.
What OxygenOS needs most right now is a stronger and more cohesive design identity. The inclusion of the Liquid Glass effects is unnecessary and feels inconsistent with the rest of the interface. More concerning, however, is how rapidly OxygenOS is shedding its individuality, with each update bringing it closer to being just another rebranded version of ColorOS or Realme UI. It’s becoming hard to see why these even exist under separate names anymore.
But that’s been a yearly complaint at this point, and things are unlikely to improve on that front. What’s good is that there are improvements to things the average user might care about, even if some of them are subtle.
