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OnePlus' Oxygen OS 11 could borrow these cool new features from Hydrogen OS 11
- OnePlus has announced Hydrogen OS 11 based on Android 11.
- The China-specific skin comes with a ton of new features.
- All these features could also land on Oxygen OS 11.
OnePlus has officially unveiled its Android 11-based Hydrogen OS 11 software. Hydrogen OS is OnePlus’ China-specific Android skin without Google Play services and pre-installed Google apps. In the rest of the world, the company equips its phones with Oxygen OS. While the two skins are different names, they are made by the same team and share a very similar codebase. So it’s only natural to presume that the new Hydrogen OS features could also land on Oxygen OS in the future.
Hydrogen OS 11 adds a ton of new features (h/t: ITHome) to OnePlus phones in China. The software update comes with the highly anticipated always-on display, multi-user Zen Mode, new animations, and a new Weather app.
It also adds a one-handed mode to OnePlus phones, new wallpapers that change based on the time of day, and voice notes with AI-powered speech-to-text conversion.
Also read: Give me a great software skin over stock Android any day
The dark mode has also received some UI changes in Hydrogen OS 11 (see image below). It now uses different shades of black for better clarity and distinction of information. Additionally, it now supports time-based activation and has a quick settings toggle.
Further, Hydrogen OS 11 also features a new ORM memory management system. It’s designed to improve RAM management, run more apps with the same amount of memory, and reduce the probability of apps being killed in the background.
The new software also features a Turbo Booster 2.0 mode aimed at OnePlus phones with high refresh rate screens. It allows the phones to better maintain the full frame rate for tasks like gaming.
You can see a quick official OnePlus video below summarizing all the main features of Hydrogen OS 11.
Hydrogen OS 11 availability
Hydrogen OS 11 will roll out to the OnePlus 6 and all its successors. OnePlus has already released the developer build of Hydrogen 11 in China for the OnePlus 8 series. It comes with most of the new features mentioned above. The stable version is scheduled to roll out in Q4 2020.
Meanwhile, OnePlus also has an Android 11 beta program for the OnePlus 8 series outside of China. However, none of the new Hydrogen OS 11 features are available in the Android 11 developer preview for the global OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro models.
See also: Here’s when OnePlus will release its final OxygenOS 11 preview