OnePlus is set to take a more profound stance on functional AI, announcing that Google’s Gemini would power Mind Space on its OxygenOS 16 for flagships soon. The firm’s India arm already hinted at the upgrade, stating that it would turn Mind Space into a more intelligent center that would arrange, recognize, and follow up on your saved smartphone content. Mind Space is OnePlus’s in-house private vault for all your notes, articles, screenshots, and captures. Already, it summarizes all items and annotates them with keywords for easy finding later. However, with Gemini support, the vault will become semantic, enabling you to ask queries in plain English rather than just letting you search.
What Gemini inside Mind Space means for OxygenOS 16
This means that you can ask the smartphone, “Plan a Paris trip checklist for five days using my photos from the museum and bookmarked café screenshots” and get a consult based on your material. That’s a major step up from dumb chatbots since the model can use a vetted and collected personal index, not only the World Wide Web. You’ll remember the bundles you save more quickly — flight numbers, warranty PDFs, meeting notes — without having to scroll. Gemini can also generate clean summaries, extract key specifics, or even background lists and reminders from submissions. While OnePlus had already integrated Gemini into OxygenOS 15 as a general AI, this version includes a more contextually relevant layer based on your existing content.
How Gemini may work on-device across supported models
On capable hardware, OnePlus can run part of Gemini directly on the phone, making the response faster and more private. For example, the OnePlus 12 with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can support on-device models such as Gemini Nano for classification and summarization; executing a heavier planning workload would typically draw from a cloud tier like Gemini Pro. This hybrid model is similar to what Google’s pitching following its announcement of Android 12L’s AICore and Gemini expansion, and OxygenOS 16 is well-suited to tap that stack.
In practice, one can imagine permission prompts that explicitly allow Gemini access to Mind Space. For the most part, scoped access will keep the assistant inside the vault unless otherwise allowed. An excellent implementation would include per-app toggles and processing indicators.
OnePlus confirms the feature will debut first on “flagship devices” with OxygenOS 16. The next-generation devices are the likely introduction point, though recent flagships will almost certainly follow via a software update. Rollouts for major AI features are likely to be staggered by region and model but depend on language pack readiness, cloud tier capacity, and regulatory approval. Portions of this experience could still reach older phones, though the richest features — especially those leveraging on-device inference — tend to demand the newest chips and NPUs. If your phone currently supports live transcription or on-device summarization, that’s a good signal for Mind Space.
Data governance, privacy safeguards, and user control
Since Mind Space will be pushing itself as your personal locker, data governance will make or break the feature. On-device processing can keep quick lookups and classification local, while cloud requests will need to honor Google’s Gemini service policies instead. Adding clear headers and labels, encryption at rest, and transparent retention/deletion assistance to the system should put users’ minds at ease when they send travel plans, receipts, and private notes to the system.
You should also expect a transparent system of controls: you should be able to deny Gemini access to specific folders, disable cloud processing for nominated queries, and delete all context and intent from the local cache with a single tap. The successful implementations treat the AI as an overlay that you control, rather than a volatile background task you have to pin down.
Rivals, market context, and what to watch for next
Rivals will be chasing similar integration of AI and personal data right now. Samsung’s Galaxy AI integrates with Notes and Recorder to sum up and automatically translate the user’s content. Apple Intelligence is anchored in private compute but can act across Mail, Notes, and system UI, while Xiaomi and Oppo plant similar hooks into their Android skins. Market watchers at Counterpoint Research have identified on-device AI as a key premium phone feature, and OnePlus’s move is congruent with the trend. For OnePlus to stand out, it will need to lean into utility over novelty. If Mind Space and Gemini can consistently find the right snippet, make a plan with your common preferences from the data it holds in offline mode for simple use and retrieval, it will feel like a feature rather than an experiment.
What to watch next — if the experience is polished, you can expect:
- Natural-language search across your screenshots, business-card snapboards, and notebook shelves
- Automatic tag normalization that makes data scrubbing less of a chore
- Cross-app actions that create meeting events from summaries
- Thoughtful battery management and query-size constraints that avoid pulling back the curtain on the waiting wizard to see the tired face
In the meantime, OnePlus is sending a message that OxygenOS 16 will turn Mind Space into more than a simple repository. With Gemini as its beating heart, it intends to turn it into a personal planner, personal assistant, and personal manager, all based on the data you already trust your phone with.
