The latest official version of Android 11 for the OnePlus 8 series unlocks Canvas on the phones

OnePlus recently bowed to public demand and pledged to implement AOD options in its custom form of Android, OxygenOS (OOS). The results included some creative ways to show something on a phone's screen, one of which is Canvas, in which a wire-form version of a user's lockscreen is generated in order to supplant it when AOD is on.

This feature, along with a few others, were first available on the OnePlus 8T, the OEM's latest flagship refresh. However, Canvas has now made its way into the latest "stable" update for the early-year premium devices, the 8 and 8 Pro.

However, this form of the feature is not available in AOD form and only as an ambient display (which activates when a device is picked up) instead, unfortunately. This update also contains frame-stability and adaptive-brightness optimizations, as well as October 2020 Android security patches despite the fact that it is now November.

In other adverse news for users of these phones, those on the "beta" channel (a stream of OTA updates with slightly newer or experimental features compared to its "stable" counterpart) risked losing all data on their devices as the update pushed to them was not in fact OOS Open Beta 3 but the latest stable update (OOS 11.0.1.1).

The only way to prevent this data loss was to keep the phone in question switched off. However, the OEM has posted a link to an APK to be installed via recovery on such devices. This solution should prevent data loss on booting the 8 or 8 Pro in question up again.