Second Open Beta for OnePlus 5/5T & OnePlus 6/6T in March brings UI enhancements

Thanks to their bi-monthly security update policy, OnePlus phones usually get security patches with a slight delay. For example, the Chinese OEM provided January 2019 security patch, then jumped directly to March by skipping February security bulletins altogether.

As the monthly security patches are cumulative, the practice is still viable. Although from a security standpoint, the devices are vulnerable to a strong 0-day exploit anyway.

Around mid-March, OnePlus rolled out a new set of Open Beta builds for OnePlus 5/5T and OnePlus 6/6T. Besides March security patches, the updates brought mostly cosmetic changes like new animations and lock screen improvements.

However, the stable channel builds are still on January security patch. In yesterday’s daily dose of OnePlus news, we highlighted that the company may distribute the next wave of stable update in early April – at least for OnePlus 6/6T.

Turns out, OnePlus engineers were cooking something else as well. They just pushed another set of Open Beta builds for the OnePlus 5/5T and OnePlus 6/6T. As you may speculate now, they are based on the same March security update.

The changelog for the latest Open Beta 29 (OnePlus 5) and Open Beta 27 (OnePlus 5T) are as follows:

System

– Screenshot UI optimizations

Launcher

– Improved color adaptation for cards in the shelf

OnePlus Switch

– Supported permissions migration for applications

Weather

– More details added to weather warnings

– Weather timeline now follows system time format

– General bug fixes

Phone

– UI optimizations

On the other hand, OnePlus 6 (Open Beta 15) and 6T (Open Beta 7) have got an improved photo editor in Gallery, besides having the same fixes and improvements of OnePlus 5 and 5T.

The official announcement threads for the updates are partially live – the OnePlus 6 and 6T thread is still not published. I’m sure Manu J. has made it already; he just need to unhide it.

On the other hand, the dedicated thread for OnePlus 5/5T was published yesterday at night.

Our collaboration with Oxygen Updater helps us to grab the download links of the full update zips as well. Without further ado, here are they:

• Open Beta 29 for OnePlus 5: Download (MD5: c80fdd5bf4a08d0081b8dad87e37f551)
• Open Beta 27 for OnePlus 5T: Download (MD5: 93b84ce30809c5b416b4a5e50be9fe4a)
• Open Beta 15 for OnePlus 6: Download (MD5: 5df9b7e12fbb6d71ef524d83142ed5bc)
• Open Beta 7 for OnePlus 6T: Download (MD5: ea78f7063faf7476ab9b39190e805335)

The full zips weight about ~1.6-1.8 GB, so you may prefer not to download them over mobile data. OnePlus also provides smaller incremental OTA zips, but we prefer not to share them for the sake of clarity.

The ‘Screenshot UI optimizations’ seems pretty interesting. Users have shared a few tricks exploiting the new UI feature in the forum.

The UI of the stock Phone app has got a new overhaul as well. Components like the accents or cards are updated with new designs.

Although the announcement thread for OnePlus 6 and 6T is not available yet, multiple users have already reported about the availability of the new build. Looks like OnePlus is trying to increase the wave size of their incremental OTA roll out process.

Do you prefer to use Open Beta builds for bleeding edge updates? Let us know by commenting below.

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