CoverScreen OS was originally designed for Samsung’s flip foldables, but its latest version adds ‘experimental initial support’ for Oppo’s new flip phone.
CoverScreen OS is a piece of software that attempts to turn the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s small 3.26-inch cover display into a “fully functional mini phone.” Crucially, this means being able to access the app drawer and launch “almost any app” on the cover screen, massively increasing the amount you can do on the foldable flip phone without having to open it up. The software is downloadable from the Google Play Store.
CoverScreen OS has been available for awhile for the Samsung Z Flip 3 and 4. In fact, my colleague Allison tried it out on the Z Flip 4 last August. But while the app’s usefulness was limited on Samsung’s tiny 1.9-inch cover display, the Find N2 Flip’s portrait-oriented 3.26-inch, 720 x 382 cover display feels like it has a lot more potential.
When I reviewed the Find N2 Flip last month, I found myself getting frustrated by the limited functionality of its cover display despite being bigger than the cover display on Samsung’s flip phones. In practice I felt Oppo didn’t make the most of this larger screen real estate. The Find N2 Flip will only display the subject lines and not the body text of emails when you get a notification, for example, or only offer a few hours of weather forecasts rather than the whole day.
CoverScreen OS’s support for the Find N2 Flip is described as “experimental” and “initial” for now, but it has big ambitions. As well as the ability to launch full apps, it also aims to let you add widgets designed for the standard home screen. There’s support for a full Qwerty keyboard, voice typing, or an old-fashioned T9 keyboard. In a video demonstration, the developer demonstrates opening YouTube and then a web browser from the app drawer, and then typing into a text box using an onscreen keyboard.
Plus, according to the app’s developer, CoverScreen OS still leaves you able to use the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s default cover display functionality like system quick toggles and widgets. Just be warned that while it’s reportedly stable on Samsung’s flip phones, the app is a first preview version and still “requires some heavy sustained development effort to deliver a feature complete version,” according to its developers.
If you’d like to give CoverScreen OS a try, you can download it now over on the Google Play Store.