With the bezels of our smartphones shrinking more and more every day, OEMs have had to decide where to put the sensors that take up space The front-facing selfie camera has had top priority and companies such as Xiaomi, Vivo, and OPPO have come up with innovative ideas to keep them accessible. It's been easy to slide the earpiece to the very top of the bezel, but some of the newer phones (such as the Pixel 3 and the OnePlus 6T) have still opted to not include a notification LED at all.

We've had these LEDs in our Android phones for so long that many people have had a difficult time to transition away from them. Last month we featured an application called Pixel Pulse which creates a “pulsing” ambient display when a notification has just come in. XDA Recognized Developer and Contributor vishal_android freak created an alternative for the OnePlus 6T. Similar to Pixel Pulse, "Plus Beat" makes use of Ambient Display and generates pulses after regular time intervals.

Plus Beat comes with the following features:

  • Set time interval for notification loop on ambient display
  • Per app configurable notifications - Choose apps to display notifications.
  • Hide or Show Notification content on per app basis - Show or hide notification content on per app basis/
  • Stealth Mode - Hide all the content and show notification in the form of the app icon.
  • Custom colors for notification icons

The app has been tested on the OnePlus 6, OnePlus 6T, OnePlus 5, OnePlus 5T, OnePlus 3, OnePlus 3T, and the developer says it should work on any other phone that supports Ambient Display. Download from the Play Store below and check out the forum thread.


Check out Plus Beat in our OnePlus 6T forum