When using the hardware buttons, you have the ability to customize long press and double tap actions for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3 Navigation Buttons.
I am not a fan of a static software navigation bar sitting at the bottom of the screen all the time. I feel it’s unused space (I auto hide my Windows task bar as well) and I would much rather have things like the keyboard resting at the very bottom of the screen while I’m typing.
Thankfully, the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T both have an option to use either the software navigation bar or hardware buttons.
I appreciated that OnePlus gives us the choice to opt for one or the other right in the beginning activation process. I’ve been using that on my OnePlus 3 and have never looked back. The company has taken this a step further and given us the ability to customize various actions for the OnePlus 3 navigation buttons. There are a number of options to choose from here and this is what I’m going to show you today.
OnePlus 3 Navigation Buttons
- Launch the Settings application
- Scroll down and tap on the ‘Buttons’ option
- Make sure the On-Screen Navigation Bar is disabled
- Then scroll down and customize the long press and double tap actions for the buttons you want
Explanation
I got the idea to do this video from a YouTube comment on the video I did last week about enabling Double Tap to Sleep on the OnePlus 3. I wasn’t aware there was an option with this feature that let you sleep the device. So after I described 2 different ways of doing this (one with Nova Launcher and another with an Xposed Module), this person let me know that it can also be done by double tapping on any of the hardware buttons for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T.
So to do this, you can’t be using the software navigation bar. I would imagine there is a mod out there that will hack into the code and enable it with the software buttons, but OxygenOS doesn’t allow that. So you’ll need to launch the Settings application, scroll down so you can tap on the Buttons options and then make sure you have the On-Screen Navigation Bar disabled. Once that is done, you’ll see that you can edit the actions down at the bottom of this screen.
So you could set something like double tapping on the Home button to turn the screen off (aka putting the device to sleep). You could also set this double tap action to launch the camera application (which is popular with Samsung users). There are a number of different actions that you can assign both long pressing and double tapping for the Back button, Home button and the Recents button.
Another popular setup here is double tapping on the Recents button to switch to the last used application. This was introduced in Android 7.0 Nougat and it can be easily setup thanks to this OnePlus 3 Navigation Buttons feature. I encourage you to experiment with all of the options that are available and I hope that OnePlus expands upon this list in the future. I would like to see things like dropping the notification shade, launching a custom application and more.
