Manually Install Zen Mode on your OnePlus 6T

by Ben Madison · June 20, 2019

OxygenOS 9.5 made its debut with the OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro. It has a lot of exciting new features such as a better screen recorder, Nightscape 2.0 or that Zen Mode that everyone is talking about. Zen Mode is OnePlus’ take on Google’s Digital Wellbeing initiative. So, I bet that you also want to manually install Zen Mode on your OnePlus 6T as soon as possible.

Zen Mode is a new feature ready to basically force us to keep the phone away for a designated period of time. You can only open the camera and accept calls for the 20 minutes that Zen Mode is active. So, it’s kind of better than Digital Wellbeing since this feature only encourages you to put your phone aside via subtle cues. Zen Mode, on the other hand, literally locks you out of all apps and blocks all notifications.

You can use your OnePlus 6T phone to call 911 when in Zen Mode, as well as receive calls from your contacts or use the camera, but that’s pretty much all that you can do.

The feature should be available via Open Beta releases over the next few months, but yes, it’s a matter of waiting. This is never a problem with a community of developers always eager to help. You may already install the unofficial version of the Zen Mode, courtesy of XDA senior member acervenky.

Manually Install Zen Mode on your OnePlus 6T:

Download the APK file for the OnePlus 6T right from the start;
After downloading the APK file, you must install it on your device;
You might have to enable the option to Install unknown apps from whichever browser you use to download the APK file from;
To access the feature, open the tile modifier and look for Zen Mode;
Drag it up to your existing tiles to use it.

That’s it. Your OnePlus 6T has been upgraded! Be careful though. It really renders your phone useless for 20 minutes, so start it at your own risk.

And OnePlus has issued an official statement explaining that even if this file works on older-gen devices such as your, there are issues such as some notifications still coming in while the mode is activated. This is because the app isn’t fully optimized yet for these models, but I am Ok with that.

Experimenting is my thing, so I don’t mind such a small issue. What about you?