[Updated] Always-on Display (AOD) allegedly won't come to OnePlus 7 series stable channel after all, says support

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…

Original story (published on May 24, 2020) follows:

With the rise of better, more potent display technology like AMOLED and OLED, we’ve seen smartphone displays now able to deliver punchier, more accurate colors while remaining power efficient.

Over the past few years, we have been seeing the inclusion of the Always-on Display feature, aptly abbreviated as AOD, on many new smartphones with OLED and AMOLED panels.

OnePlus has been on a roll lately, finally being able to add support for Bitmoji AOD to its OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8T devices, a feature that users have been gawking at for months.

The previous-gen OnePlus 7 devices haven’t faired as well when it comes to getting support for the always-on display feature.

We saw the feature cause delays during the development phase of Android 11 for the OnePlus series of devices, making a few appearances in beta builds before then being omitted in the stable release.

Well, a few months after the official rollout and still, OnePlus hasn’t brought this feature to the OnePlus 7 devices. But why? What’s the hold-up?

An alleged conversation between a OnePlus 7 owner and OnePlus’ official support seems to hint at a scenario where this feature isn’t made available to users of OnePlus 7 on the stable release channel after all.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused. Due to the hardware variation of the OP 7/7T series, we can’t adopt the AOD feature scheme of the OP 8T series and other models. The Research & Development team has tried several adaption schemes and put the AOD feature online in the third version of the Open Beta.

However, after careful evaluation, the experience of the AOD feature isn’t meeting the standard of the stable version, and there is no effective optimization solution. Therefore, it has been removed from the stable version. If you’d still like to access it, we suggest going back to the Open Beta version 4.
Source

In the alleged correspondence, OnePlus interestingly asks users who would like to have the AOD feature on their OnePlus 7 devices to go back to the Open Beta 4 build.

First, that is an Open Beta build that is nowhere close to being as stable as the builds on OnePlus’ stable release channel. Secondly, that build is stuck with a 3-4 months old security patch so, why would OnePlus recommend a deprecated beta build?

With this move, OnePlus is effectively going back on its word and denying users a feature that they promised sometime back, much to the dismay of these device-owners.

For a company that did pride itself in listening to its consumers and fixing their issues and concerns, this is truly an unfortunate series of events.

We shall continue to keep an eye on this and update as and when we get more info related to OnePlus 7 AOD so stay tuned. In the meantime, we have this hacky way of enabling this feature, should you be interested.

Also, we’re closely following OnePlus’ development of Android 12-based OxygenOS 12. You can check out more on this and a list of eligible devices in our continued coverage here.

IST 03:40 pm: It seems that OnePlus is working to bring the Bitmoji AOD feature to more devices via the future OxygenOS updates, as per the latest OxygenOS monthly FAQ. More on that here.

IST 07:28 pm: It is possible that the Insight and Canvas AOD features might soon arrive on the OnePlus 7/7T series devices as the OEM has been seeking feedback regarding the same in the latest Stable OxygenOS 11 survey for the devices in question.

However, since the OnePlus 7/7T series devices currently do not support the said features on the stable channel, the OEM later removed the sections about the Insight and Canvas AOD features from the survey.

NOTE: We have these and many more OnePlus stories in our dedicated OnePlus section.

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