Last updated on November 30, 2025
The OnePlus 7 Pro made waves when it launched, pushing boundaries with its stunning display, powerful Snapdragon 855 processor, and innovative pop-up camera. Even years later, this device holds its own, offering a premium experience that many still appreciate. If you’re holding onto your OnePlus 7 Pro, you’ve got a capable phone that, with a few expert tweaks, can still deliver exceptional performance and a highly personalized user experience.
OxygenOS, OnePlus’s custom Android skin, was always a highlight, bringing a clean interface and thoughtful features. Let’s dive into some pro tips and tricks to get the absolute most out of your enduring OnePlus 7 Pro.
OnePlus 7 Pro Tips and Tricks
1. Enter the Zen Zone with Zen Mode
In our always-on world, digital well-being is more crucial than ever. The OnePlus 7 Pro introduced Zen Mode, a powerful tool for intentional digital detox. Unlike simple notification blockers or usage statistics, Zen Mode takes a firm stance: it locks you out of most phone functions for a set period, typically 20 minutes.
During this lockout, you can only make or answer calls and access the camera. This isn’t about guilt-tripping; it’s about giving yourself a forced break, encouraging you to step away from the screen and engage with your real-world surroundings. It’s an excellent way to practice mindfulness and combat screen addiction. To enable it, simply pull down your Quick Settings panel and tap the “Zen Mode” icon. Embrace the silence.
2. Drive Safer with Smart Charging Actions
Distracted driving is a serious concern, and your phone can either be a part of the problem or a part of the solution. The OnePlus 7 Pro offered a clever “driving mode” linked to its Warp Charge 30 car charger.
When you connect your phone to this specific charger in your car, you can set it to automatically activate Do Not Disturb (DND) mode or launch a preferred navigation app. This proactive approach helps minimize distractions, keeping your focus where it belongs: on the road. While general Android Auto and other driving modes have evolved, this specific integration was a thoughtful touch for OnePlus users.
3. Activate Fnatic Mode for Peak Gaming Performance
Mobile gaming demands peak performance, and the OnePlus 7 Pro delivered with its powerful internals. To truly unleash its gaming prowess, activate Fnatic Mode, named after the renowned esports organization. This isn’t just a basic game mode; it’s a comprehensive optimization suite.
Fnatic Mode aggressively allocates CPU resources to your game, ensuring maximum frame rates and responsiveness. Crucially, it features an advanced DND system that silences all calls, messages, and notifications – except for alarms and low battery warnings – preventing any immersion-breaking interruptions. Once your gaming session is over, you can review a history log of all missed communications. To enable, navigate to Settings > Utilities > Game Mode, add your favorite games, and then select “Fnatic Mode” from the notification shade when a game launches. It’s an essential for serious mobile gamers.
4. Try DC Dimming for Eye Comfort
The OnePlus 7 Pro’s AMOLED display is gorgeous, but like many OLED panels, it can use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) for brightness control, which some users perceive as flicker, especially in low light. This can lead to eye strain or headaches for sensitive individuals.
OnePlus introduced “DC Dimming” as an experimental feature in OnePlus Laboratory to combat this. DC Dimming adjusts brightness by directly controlling the current supplied to the screen, significantly reducing flicker. While it was a “lab function” and occasionally buggy in its early days, for many, the reduction in eye strain was well worth it. If you experience discomfort with your screen in dim environments, give it a try: Settings > Utilities > OnePlus Laboratory > DC Dimmer. Toggle the switch to activate.
5. Boost RAM for Faster App Launches
Your phone’s RAM is crucial for multitasking and app loading speed. The OnePlus 7 Pro featured “RAM Boost,” an intelligent feature designed to optimize memory allocation. This system learns your usage habits, predicting which apps you’re likely to open next or which data sets you’ll need.
By intelligently pre-loading these elements into RAM, your phone can significantly reduce app launch times and improve overall system responsiveness. It makes multitasking feel seamless and snappy, even with several apps open. To ensure your phone is always one step ahead, enable this feature via Settings > System > RAM Boost.
6. Calibrate Screen Resolution for Battery Life
The OnePlus 7 Pro was a pioneer for the brand, offering a QHD+ (3120×1440) resolution display, a significant jump from previous 1080p panels. While this higher resolution delivers incredibly sharp visuals, it also consumes more battery power.
The smart move is to switch between resolutions based on your needs. For everyday tasks and extending battery life, drop down to FHD+ (2336×1080). When you’re settling in for a movie, streaming high-resolution video, or truly want to appreciate fine details in photos, bump it back up to QHD+. You can easily toggle this in Settings > Display > Resolution. It’s all about balancing visual fidelity with practical battery management.
7. Enhance Video Colors with Video Enhancer
Beyond its high resolution, the OnePlus 7 Pro’s display was engineered for an exceptional multimedia experience. The “Video Enhancer” feature takes this a step further, subtly improving the color saturation and contrast of videos.
This isn’t about magically upscaling low-resolution content; instead, it makes existing colors pop and details more vibrant, making your favorite shows and movies even more engaging. The best part? It works automatically with popular streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube, so you don’t need to configure anything per app. Simply enable it in Settings > Display > Video Enhancer.
8. Immerse Yourself with Dolby Atmos Audio
A great visual experience deserves equally impressive audio. The OnePlus 7 Pro comes with integrated Dolby Atmos support, transforming your sound experience with virtual surround sound. This technology creates a more immersive and cinematic audio landscape, whether you’re using headphones or the phone’s stereo speakers.
You can choose from three distinct audio profiles: Dynamic, Film, and Music, each optimized for different content. Additionally, for wired earphones, you can select from “Balance,” “Warm,” or “Nuanced” sound preferences, further tailoring the audio output to your taste. Don’t forget to explore the equalizer settings for even deeper customization. To unlock this sonic upgrade, go to Settings > Sound & Vibration > Dolby Atmos.
9. Optimize Refresh Rate for Battery Longevity
One of the OnePlus 7 Pro’s standout features was its 90Hz Fluid AMOLED display, offering a buttery-smooth scrolling experience and incredibly fluid animations. However, running the display at 90Hz uses more power than the standard 60Hz.
If you prioritize battery life, especially on days when you’re away from a charger, consider switching your display refresh rate to 60Hz. While you’ll notice a slight difference in smoothness, the battery gains can be significant. It’s a trade-off worth considering for extended usage. Adjust this setting in Settings > Display > Refresh Rate.
10. Launch Super-Fast Apps with Quick Start
Need instant access to your most-used apps? The OnePlus 7 Pro’s Quick Start feature leverages the in-display fingerprint sensor for ultra-fast app launching. Instead of just unlocking your phone, you can press and hold the fingerprint icon slightly longer, and a customizable radial menu of your favorite apps will appear.
This allows you to jump directly into an app from a locked screen or ambient display, saving precious seconds. To set this up, go to Settings > Utilities > Quick Start, enable the feature, and then select your preferred shortcut apps and their positions. It’s an underrated productivity booster.
11. Master Screenshots Like a Pro
Screenshots on the OnePlus 7 Pro are far more than just a static image capture. The device offers advanced screenshot capabilities, including scrolling screenshots for capturing long web pages or conversations.
But the real power comes after the capture. Once you take a screenshot, a small thumbnail appears in the bottom right corner. Tap it to enter an editing interface where you can annotate, draw, crop, and even blur sensitive information directly on the image. This built-in functionality is incredibly useful for sharing information while maintaining privacy or highlighting key details.
12. Record Your Screen with Ease
Whether you’re creating a quick tutorial, capturing a gaming highlight, or demonstrating a bug, the OnePlus 7 Pro’s integrated Screen Recorder is a fantastic tool. It offers robust features, allowing you to select screen resolution, bit rate, and even your audio source (internal audio, microphone, or both).
A subtle “touch-marker” can be enabled to show taps on the screen, making tutorials clearer. The on-screen controls are discreet and disappear during recording, only reappearing with a double-tap to stop. The recording automatically pauses if the phone is locked. While it provides a persistent notification when active, this ensures you’re always aware it’s running.
13. Personalize Fingerprint Unlock Animations
Why stick with the default when you can add a touch of personal flair? The OnePlus 7 Pro allows you to customize the animation that plays when you unlock your phone using the in-display fingerprint sensor.
Head to Settings > Security & Lock Screen > Fingerprint > Fingerprint animation effect. Choose from the available styles to give your phone a unique visual signature. While you’re there, if you find the “lift to wake” gesture too sensitive, consider keeping the “Touch the screen to show” option enabled under Ambient Display settings for more control over when your ambient display activates.
14. Unlock Smartly with Face Unlock Preferences
Even with its mechanical pop-up camera, the OnePlus 7 Pro’s Face Unlock was remarkably fast. By default, it often bypasses the lock screen entirely, taking you straight to your home screen.
However, if you prefer to land on the lock screen first – perhaps to review notifications without fully unlocking – you can change this behavior. Go to Settings > Security & Lock Screen > Face Unlock > Default mode to unlock and select the option that keeps you on the lock screen. It’s a small but significant tweak for those who value a quick glance at their notifications before diving into their apps.
15. Always See Your Battery Percentage
While the battery icon gives you a general idea, seeing the exact percentage remaining provides far more practical information. This isn’t a groundbreaking feature, but it’s essential for smart power management.
To display the precise battery percentage in your status bar, navigate to Settings > Display > Status Bar and toggle on “Show Battery Percentage.” If you prefer a minimalist look, you can even hide the battery icon itself while keeping the percentage visible by tapping “Battery style” and selecting “Hidden battery.”
16. Set a Snazzy Ambient Display
The OnePlus 7 Pro’s Ambient Display is a fantastic way to get glanceable information without fully waking your phone. When you pick up your device or receive a notification, the screen subtly lights up to show you the time, date, and pending alerts.
You can customize the Ambient Display with different clock styles, notification styles, and even add a personalized message. It’s an efficient way to stay informed at a glance while conserving battery compared to a fully active screen. Enable and customize it in Settings > Display > Ambient Display.
17. Embrace Android Pie-Style Navigation Gestures
For those who prefer a more modern, immersive interface, the OnePlus 7 Pro offered Android Pie-style navigation gestures. This replaces the traditional three-button navigation with a sleek, pill-shaped home button at the bottom.
With these gestures, you swipe up from the pill for home, swipe up and hold for recent apps, and tap the left side for back. OxygenOS also allowed for some customization, like swapping the back button’s position. You could even assign double-tap and long-press actions to these buttons for extra shortcuts. Explore these options in Settings > Buttons & Gestures > Navigation bar & gestures. It’s a more fluid and screen-maximized way to interact with your device.
Keeping Your OnePlus 7 Pro Running Strong in 2025
While the OnePlus 7 Pro is no longer receiving major Android version updates, it still benefits from security patches for a period. To ensure your device remains a reliable daily driver:
- Software Updates: Always install the latest available security patches to protect against vulnerabilities.
- Battery Health: For an older device, battery degradation is natural. Monitor your battery health in settings and consider a professional battery replacement if performance significantly declines.
- App Management: Regularly clear app caches and uninstall unused applications to free up storage and RAM.
- Security Practices: Use strong passwords, two-factor authentication, and be wary of suspicious links or downloads.
The OnePlus 7 Pro, with its Snapdragon 855 and liquid cooling, was built for performance. By leveraging these tips and maintaining good digital hygiene, you can continue to enjoy a premium smartphone experience for years to come. Which of these pro tips will you activate first? I’m betting you’re eager to experience the immersive audio of Dolby Atmos.
Elevating Your Audio Experience with Dolby Atmos
The OnePlus 7 Pro wasn’t just built for visual immersion; its audio capabilities, powered by Dolby Atmos, are equally impressive. This technology goes beyond simple stereo, creating a rich, three-dimensional soundscape that places you right in the center of the action. Whether you’re watching a movie, listening to music, or diving into a game, Dolby Atmos adds depth, clarity, and detail that standard audio often misses.
To unlock this premium audio, navigate to your phone’s Settings > Sound & vibration > Dolby Atmos. Here, you’ll find several preset sound profiles: “Dynamic,” “Movie,” and “Music.” The “Dynamic” profile intelligently adjusts the sound based on the content you’re consuming, offering a balanced enhancement. For film buffs, the “Movie” profile emphasizes dialogue clarity and impactful effects, making cinematic experiences more immersive. Music lovers, on the other hand, will appreciate the “Music” profile, which aims for a wider soundstage and enhanced instrument separation. Beyond these presets, you can dive deeper with the graphic equalizer, allowing you to fine-tune frequencies to your exact preference, whether you’re boosting bass for a punchier sound or sharpening trebles for clearer vocals. Remember that the full effect of Dolby Atmos is best experienced with quality headphones, though its enhancements also noticeably improve the phone’s stereo speakers.
Mastering the OnePlus 7 Pro’s Versatile Camera System
Beyond its raw power, the OnePlus 7 Pro boasts a versatile triple-camera setup and an innovative pop-up selfie camera, offering a wide array of photographic possibilities. The main 48MP sensor, often pixel-binned to produce excellent 12MP shots, is complemented by an ultra-wide-angle lens for expansive landscapes and a telephoto lens for optical zoom, allowing you to capture everything from grand vistas to distant details without sacrificing quality. Features like Nightscape dramatically improve low-light photography, bringing out details and colors that would otherwise be lost in shadow, while Portrait Mode intelligently blurs backgrounds to create professional-looking shots with a pleasing bokeh effect.
For those who crave more control, the Pro Mode is your playground. Here, you can manually adjust ISO sensitivity, shutter speed, white balance, and even focus, giving you the power to craft your images precisely as you envision them. Experimenting with longer shutter speeds in low light, combined with a stable surface or tripod, can yield stunning light trail effects or crisp night scenes. Don’t shy away from exploring the video capabilities either; the OnePlus 7 Pro can record in crisp 4K resolution and offers super slow-motion modes to capture fleeting moments with dramatic flair. While the stock camera app is robust, some enthusiasts also explore third-party camera applications like modified Google Camera (GCam) ports, which can sometimes offer alternative image processing for different aesthetics, though these often require sideloading and may not always be officially supported.
Unleashing Peak Performance for Gaming and Beyond
The OnePlus 7 Pro’s core, the Snapdragon 855 chipset paired with a sophisticated liquid cooling system, was engineered for sustained high performance, making it a formidable device for demanding applications and, especially, gaming. To truly unleash this potential, you’ll want to leverage specific features designed to optimize your experience. The dedicated Fnatic Mode (now often referred to as Gaming Mode or Pro Gaming Mode in later OxygenOS versions) is a game-changer. Activating it from the quick settings panel or within the Game Space app silences intrusive notifications, prioritizes network bandwidth for your game, and can even enhance haptic feedback for a more tactile experience. This ensures an uninterrupted, lag-free session where every frame counts.
Beyond Fnatic Mode, consider optimizing individual game settings. Many modern titles allow you to adjust graphics quality, frame rates, and resolution. While the OnePlus 7 Pro can handle high settings, dialing back some non-essential visual elements slightly can sometimes provide an even smoother, more consistent 90Hz experience, which is where the phone truly shines. For the most advanced users, diving into Developer Options (enabled by tapping “Build number” seven times in “About phone” settings) can offer further tweaks. Reducing animation scales (Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, Animator duration scale) to .5x or even turning them off can make the entire UI feel snappier, freeing up precious CPU cycles for your active applications. Regularly updating your applications and the OxygenOS itself also plays a crucial role, as these updates often include performance enhancements and bug fixes that keep your device running at its peak.
Advanced Tips
Beyond the readily accessible settings, several advanced strategies can further reclaim your device’s speed. For users comfortable delving deeper, exploring alternative launchers can yield significant performance gains. While OxygenOS’s default launcher is optimized, a lightweight third-party launcher like Nova Launcher or Lawnchair can often offer a snappier experience with fewer background processes and more customization options, potentially reducing RAM usage and CPU load.
Another powerful technique involves managing background app activity more aggressively. Even if an app isn’t actively open, it might be consuming resources in the background, fetching data, or performing updates. Navigate to `Settings > Apps > See all apps`, select individual applications, and then choose `Mobile data & Wi-Fi`. Here, you can disable `Background data` for apps that don’t require constant internet access, preventing them from consuming bandwidth and battery when not in use. Similarly, within `Battery` settings for each app, restricting background activity can prevent rogue applications from silently draining resources.
For persistent performance issues, especially after major system updates, clearing the cache partition can often resolve underlying conflicts without erasing your personal data. This process typically involves booting your device into recovery mode (the exact steps vary slightly by OnePlus model, but usually involve holding down the power and volume down buttons simultaneously when restarting). From the recovery menu, select the option to `Wipe cache partition`. This action removes temporary system files that can sometimes become corrupted and hinder performance.
Finally, for users experiencing severe and unresolvable slowdowns, a factory reset remains the ultimate troubleshooting step. While a factory reset will erase all data on your device, returning it to its out-of-the-box state, it often resolves deep-seated software issues that no other method can address. Always ensure you have a complete backup of your important data before proceeding with a factory reset.
Maintenance
Maintaining optimal performance on your OnePlus device is an ongoing process that extends beyond initial tweaks. Regular digital hygiene plays a crucial role in preventing slowdowns and ensuring your phone continues to run smoothly.
One often-overlooked aspect is managing internal storage. A device with critically low storage space can experience significant performance degradation, as the system struggles to allocate temporary files and manage application data efficiently. Regularly review your storage usage via `Settings > Storage` and identify large files, unused apps, or duplicate photos that can be deleted to free up space. Tools like Google Files Go can assist in identifying and removing junk files, duplicate images, and rarely used applications.
Furthermore, routinely checking for and installing OxygenOS updates and application updates is paramount. OnePlus frequently releases software updates that include performance enhancements, bug fixes, and security patches that are vital for maintaining a fast and secure device. Similarly, app developers continuously optimize their applications, and keeping them updated ensures you benefit from the latest improvements and bug resolutions. Enable automatic updates for both your system and applications where possible, or make it a habit to check for them manually at least once a week.
Lastly, being mindful of the number of active widgets and live wallpapers can also contribute to sustained performance. While visually appealing, many widgets constantly refresh in the background, consuming CPU cycles and RAM. The same applies to elaborate live wallpapers. Opting for static wallpapers and only using essential widgets can help keep your home screen light and responsive, reserving your device’s resources for your active tasks.
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