Some of you who have purchased the OnePlus 6T are quite probably extremely irritated by the missing LED notification light, and if that’s the case, there’s an app out there that may help you, to an extent. An app called “Plus Beat” appeared in the Google Play Store, and it utilizes the phone’s Ambient Display functions in order to send color pulses to your display, similar to what you’d get in form of a notification LED light. Now, in this app, you can choose which apps you’d like to trigger this functionality, while you have all sorts of additional settings available in the app. You can set time intervals for these pulses to occur, the lowest time interval you can set is 10 seconds. You can also instruct the app to show you all the notification content on the display, in addition to the color flashes, or you can just get color flashes which will indicate that you have a new notification.
Speaking of which, you can change colors for specific apps, so, for example, if you receive an e-mail through your Gmail app, you can choose a red color, while you can set a green one for WhatsApp, for example. In addition to that, you can also set the opacity for said color, the app gives you all the necessary liberty to tweak it to your liking. Having said that, the company says that this app has been tested with the OnePlus 3, 3T, 5, 5T, 6, and 6T, but that it should work with any phone that has the Ambient Display functionality. One more thing to note, in order to make this app to work on your OnePlus handset, you need to enabled the “Wake screen when you receive notifications” option in Settings -> Display -> Ambient Display, and also remove “Plus Beat” from the Battery Optimization menu. This application is completely free to install and use.
Background: OnePlus has been utilizing LED notification lights in its device up until the OnePlus 6T. The company opted to remove the LED light as it wanted to make the bezels as thin as possible, plus the company says that its Ambient Display kind of replaces the LED notification light, which is simply not the case. Most users probably don’t care about this omission, but some of them were quite vocal when the company introduced the device. This move probably means that the OnePlus 7 will not have that component either, but it remains to be seen what will happen in the end, as the arrival of the OnePlus 7 is still a couple of months away.
Impact: Not a single app can replace a hardware component fully, same goes for Plus Beat, but the app does give a rather interesting functionality to phones which have the Ambient Display functionality but don’t have an LED notification light, like the OnePlus 6T, for example. Your phone’s display will constantly flash and let you know that you have unread notifications, while the app also gives you plenty of customization options, which is always nice to have.
