OnePlus amassed a cult following over minor but satisfying hardware touches, and none was as beloved as the three-stage alert slider.
There is no longer that hallmark on the OnePlus 15; instead, a programmable Plus Key doubles up with a link to a new AI journaling feature, Mind Space. It presents itself as a downgrade to anyone using an iPhone every day, and discards part of what made it so special in exchange for a single solution to the problem of trying to be too much by being not enough.
Why the Alert Slider Was Important for OnePlus Users
It’s simply faster, more reliable, and less mentally taxing to deal with a physical, stateful control than it is to navigate through touch interfaces or multiple screen pages in software. The slider’s ring–vibrate–silent positions were immediately discernible; you could shut off sound in a dim theater or a noisy boardroom without firing up the screen. Human–computer interaction research going back decades from the Nielsen Norman Group has demonstrated how muscle memory and low-friction controls cut down on mistakes, and the slider made a case study out of that principle.
There are also issues of accessibility and ergonomics. A raised switch can be manipulated with gloves, on a bike mount, or by people with limited dexterity. For my part, in repeated trials on my own timing, a slider flip was consistently executed in under one second with no false activations, whereas I found myself habitually taking more time — and becoming diverted — as I went through the wake-up–swipe–tap motions to invoke a software toggle. When you’re counting on silence soon, every additional step is friction.
A Familiar Button, and Its Problems Replace the Slider
The Plus Key is an attempt at cleverness: an action long-press and a carousel UI to change functions, plus much customization. The entire experience actually looks and feels just like Apple’s Action Button, right down to the on-screen animation and the rainbow function picker. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it imports with it the same fundamental problem: people are kind of lazy about changing the settings. Community polls on enthusiast iPhone forums continue to demonstrate that most of us keep the button as a mute control, because it’s the one action that can benefit from just a single instant gesture.
History backs this up. The Bixby/Side Key dust-up taught us that when we add layers — press versus long-press, single versus double — we are inviting misfires and slowing things down. A one-size-fits-all button is an invitation to feature creep. A purpose-built switch prevents it. OnePlus had an example of the former in the One and replaced it with just another jack-of-all-trades that is slower by design (it has to wait), and must also confirm and often show UI feedback.
Mind Space, Too, Needs Wider Scope and Better Context
Mind Space is described as an AI-powered journal that takes screenshots, groups trips and events, and makes suggestions. In use, it more resembles a scrapbook than a smart assistant. It’s capable of prompting you to make calendar entries or grouping related items together, but it requires manual curation, and “organizing” a series is essentially hard-coding the timing of events (it will happen first, second, or third on your timeline) — follow-up questions don’t often stretch beyond what was already gleanable from a screenshot.
Ask it for something specific and actionable — best spots to watch a marathon you had saved, suggestions on what to pack, cross-referencing tickets with all my transit options — and you will often get generic tips that you could have googled in two minutes. Wider assistants from Google and Microsoft, meanwhile, can dip across emails, maps, and messages when you’ve given them permission, coming up with itineraries or reminders that genuinely feel assistive. Mind Space must have deeper context, richer connectors, and explicit on-device privacy controls before it deserves that special-purpose piece of hardware.
There’s also a trust factor. Any AI that consumes screenshots has to be forthright about where it keeps data, how long it sticks around, and how a consumer’s model learns from it. Without clear and user-friendly disclosures and teensy toggles, a lot of people would just turn the Plus Key back into mute — undoing the purpose of taking the slider away in the first place.
What Power Users Want from OnePlus Buttons and AI Features
The fix isn’t complicated. Give users the tactile confidence back — either bring back the slider or allow the Plus Key to be calibratable as an authentic three-state hardware toggle with haptic acknowledgment and no on-screen fanfare. Keep the deeper AI features in software where they belong, and fortify Mind Space with useful integrations: auto-building event briefs from calendar and maps, smart alerts based on location and time windows, plus summaries that function offline right on your device.
An appreciated upgrade would be context-aware muting that respects the meetings on your calendar, doesn’t even bother to sound off in certain known locations (like movie theaters), and undoes itself automatically — something Android already does via rules but rarely finds a truly compelling way to expose. If OnePlus wants to differentiate itself, polish that experience and have the AI supplement (not supplant) the slider paradigm.
Bottom Line: OnePlus Trades Tactile Control for an AI Button
OnePlus bartered an immediate, physical control for one of those AI show-offs that looks cool but fixes less. The answer was the alert slider, an identity feature and a utilitarian masterstroke. The Plus Key and Mind Space could end up a genuinely useful thing, but right now they seem to be a cookie-cutter response rather than an assertive move. Return to certainty; make the smarts work.
