Oxygen OS 15 brings Open Canvas to more OnePlus phones

One of the biggest highlights of OnePlus Open at launch was Open Canvas. As we stated in our article OnePlus Open reviewIt’s one of the best approaches to multitasking on any foldable phone. Open Canvas lets you run up to three apps side by side in full screen and switch between them seamlessly. If you’re jealous of OnePlus users who can use Open Canvas, here’s good news: OnePlus is bringing Open Canvas to its chocolate phones. Oxygen OS 15 based on Android15.

Open Canvas launched with the OnePlus Open and was later expanded to the company’s tablet, the OnePlus Pad 2. Open Canvas lets you run two apps in split-screen mode on these widescreen devices and hang a third app overflowing to the side. A quick four-finger pinch will show all apps on the screen at once, but most of the time the two-plus-one layout works better for multitasking.

With Oxygen OS 15, OnePlus brings Open Canvas to its sugary smartphones. However, since the size of the screen is an obvious limitation, you can only launch two apps at a time; one is your primary app, the other is overloaded for easy switching.

Android has been using split-screen multitasking since Android 7 Nougat in 2016, and even earlier in some OEM skins. What OnePlus does differently with Open Canvas is that it allows you to maintain an almost full-screen window size in your primary app while keeping the secondary app active for easy switching. This makes multitasking efficient and convenient as you won’t have to settle for half-panes in your apps if you want.

Of course, Open Canvas is more useful on a OnePlus device with a larger screen. But these two apps aren’t that bad on sugary phones either. From what I can see, Open Canvas extends Android’s split-screen multitasking view; you can run two applications half-way in windows or let one of them float up or down.

You can enable Open Canvas on Oxygen OS by going to: Settings > Accessibility and convenience > Split View.

Once enabled, you can open split-screen windows in three ways:

• Swipe up with three fingers on any screen.
• Touch and hold an app in the Smart Sidebar and drag it out.
• On the Recent Tasks screen, tap the three dots in the upper-right corner of an app window and select Split Screen.

I find swiping up is the easiest method to perform, although it requires a second hand to hold the phone.

What do you think about OnePlus Open Canvas rolling out to more phones via Oxygen OS 15? Let us know in the comments below!