The OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T have a hardware alert slider for adjusting notification modes, and you can customize them to suit your needs.
The iPhone has had an alert slider on their phones for years, and it has been really surprising that we don’t see this added to more Android phones. OnePlus has been a fan of this hardware alert slider and they’ve been putting it in their phones since the OnePlus One.
This is on both the OnePlus 3 as well as the OnePlus 3T, and we have some interesting customization options built into the OxygenOS software too.
Having the alert slider pushed to the bottom will keep it in Ring mode, which is just a regular mode where you can get notifications and calls like normal. Sliding this up to the middle spot will trigger Do Not Disturb Mode, and this will limit the amount and type of notifications you are alerted by. Lastly is the top spot of the slider, and this will put your phone into Silent mode so that it will block even more notification alerts.
So let me show you where this feature is located and then I’ll explain some of the customization options that OxygenOS offers.
OnePlus 3 Alert Slider
- Launch the Settings application
- Scroll down to the Customization section
- Tap on the Alert Slider option
- Tap on either of the Ring, Do Not Disturb or Silent options
- Then customize that mode to how you want things
Explanation
So, Android has a few couple of notification modes built into the phone. With the notification ring volume up, it’s in normal mode (like Ring mode as described above). Then when you press the Volume Down button to make it go to zero, this triggers Do Not Disturb mode (again, like described above). When you’re in Do Not Disturb mode and you press the Volume Down button again, you’re entered in Silent mode (which is labeled Alarms Only on other Android devices).
These are the same three modes that we have on the OnePlus 3 and the OnePlus 3T. We’re just able to instantly access these three modes with a hardware slider on the side of the phone. We’re also able to customize some options when these three modes are active on these devices. So to access them, we’ll need to launch the Settings application and then scroll down to tap on the Alert Slider option from within the Customization section.
Once you are here, you’ll see an image like you see above that shows you each of the three modes we can activate with the hardware Alert Slider. When we tap on the Ring option we’re able to tell the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T whether or not we want the phone to vibrate when we are receiving a phone call. There aren’t much options here because this is the regular mode where the phone assumes you want to receive all of your notifications.
When we tap on the Do Not Disturb option, this is where we enter our first level of lock outs. At the top, we’re reminded that alarms will be allowed through when we have Do Not Disturb mode on, but we can choose whether or not we also want to be alerted to Reminders and/or Events. We also have an option to set favorite contacts and can then choose whether or not we want to be alerted to text messages and/or phone calls from those favorite contacts.
Lastly, we have the option to allow a phone call through if the person calls a second time within 3 minutes (in case of emergencies), and we can choose whether or not we want the notification light to pulse when Do Not Disturb mode is active. Now, when we have Silent mode active, we’re want to block out all calls, all event and reminder notifications, and all regular app notifications as well.
Android will still allow alarms to go through when Silent mode is activated, but there are a couple of options we have here. We can choose to silence the media volume level if we’d like (which isn’t required), and we also have the ability to let the phone vibrate or not when a notification comes in. So for example, you might not want to hear a notification sound when a phone call comes in, but when you’re in Silent mode, you can choose to let the phone vibrate when a call comes in.
I really do like that OnePlus has given us so many customization options for these three Alert Slider levels, but I would definitely like to see more. Thankfully there’s a way to customize this even further, but it requires Xposed Framework. Since this isn’t available on Nougat right now, I’ll have to wait until it’s released before I can show it off to you.
