Today OnePlus is releasing its second open beta build of Android 7.0 Nougat for the OnePlus 3. The first testing Nougat release for this phone became available at the end of November, and now, a couple of weeks later, the Chinese company is already providing some improvements to the experience.
Officially called OxygenOS Open Beta 9 for OnePlus 3, the new Nougat-based firmware comes with support for expanded screenshots as well as a bunch of optimizations having to do with the UI in general, but also DPI settings and battery performance. The overall stability and performance of the OS have been improved too, and there are some unnamed “general bug fixes” implemented as well.
If you’re rocking a OnePlus 3 and have flashed a previous Open Beta build, this new one will be sent to you as an over-the-air update. If you haven’t tried an Open Beta yet, you’ll need to flash this one by using ADB sideload. Once you flash it, you’ll continue to get new beta builds over-the-air whenever they are released.
A key thing to note here is that once you’re on the Open Beta train, you will not receive OTA software updates for official, final, stable OxygenOS releases. You’ll need to manually clean flash your phone back to an official build in order to then start receiving OTA updates for those. Rolling back to official OxygenOS builds requires wiping data, unfortunately.