OPPO has officially unveiled ColorOS 17 with a redesigned user experience centered on the new Living Flow Design alongside a suite of expanded AI capabilities. The new update is set to debut on the upcoming OPPO Find X10 Series, with a progressive rollout planned for additional OPPO devices worldwide.
ColorOS 17: Living Flow Design
According to the smartphone maker, Living Flow Design is built around three core ideas: Luminous Effect, Fluid Motion, and Flexible Feedback. Luminous Effect introduces “softer, more translucent visuals” that create a “refined sense of depth,” with subtle lighting responding naturally to touch; Fluid Motion enables interface elements to “move, merge, and transform seamlessly from one state to the next.” Flexible Feedback makes buttons and interactive elements visibly “compress, stretch, and rebound” on tap, giving interactions “a more immediate and tactile feel.”
Based on the images and the content shown above anyway, it doesn’t really look like much of a deviation from Apple’s Liquid Glass – and we all know it’s just a habit for Chinese smartphone makers to mimic whatever Apple has done, as it has been the case in the past.
Anyhow, underpinning these visual improvements is a new Unified Rendering Architecture built on the refreshed Luminous Rendering Engine. By consolidating previously separate rendering processes into a single pipeline, the architecture reduces redundant operations, cutting rendering loads by up to 30% and RAM usage for rendering by up to 25% compared to ColorOS 16.
System responsiveness also benefits from the upgraded Laminar Flow Engine, an intelligent resource scheduling system built on OPPO’s Adaptive Scheduling Architecture. With it, app launch stability improves by 55%, Gallery thumbnails load up to 50% faster on first launch, and ColorOS 17 can keep over 25% more apps running in the background during multitasking. In tests simulating six years of use with storage at 90% capacity, ColorOS 17 retained over 90% of its initial smoothness.
AI Features: Mind Pilot, Photo Agent and OSee
ColorOS 17 expands OPPO AI with system-level agentic capabilities through an upgraded AI Mind Pilot featuring a new Agent Mode. It can work directly with photos and files stored on the device, search across multiple sources, and coordinate multiple steps to complete tasks based on user requests. Example uses include organizing and renaming scattered files, generating travel itineraries, and creating webpages from existing content.
AI Photo Agent makes photo editing more intuitive through natural language instructions or automated scene analysis. A new Style Match feature allows users to provide a reference image, with AI Photo Agent applying its color palette, tone, and mood to the user’s own photo.
AI Mind Space, OPPO’s personal information hub, gains the ability to save documents and video links, with AI converting them into structured, searchable memories. A new Memory Collections feature automatically groups related memories into summaries and can combine saved content with destination maps to create personalised trip plans.
AI Mind Suggest delivers contextual recommendations throughout the day, including morning briefs, travel reminders, flight and train cards, and music suggestions when headphones are connected. OSee brings OPPO’s visual AI tools into a single integrated experience, allowing users to go from pointing the camera at an object directly to services such as object recognition, nutrition analysis, high-definition scanning, and translation.
Privacy & Security Features
Similar to Apple, OPPO’s Private Computing Cloud handles cloud-based AI processing with end-to-end encryption within a secure environment designed to prevent third-party access, including by OPPO itself. ColorOS 17 adds post-quantum security capabilities to this framework, applying a dual-encryption mechanism to data transmitted between the device and the cloud to guard against threats posed by quantum computing.
A new Transparency Report gives users direct visibility into how their data is processed, detailing which AI services were used, when they were accessed, and what operations were performed. The report can be viewed on-device and exported at any time. Meanwhile, AI Call Guard – available in Indonesia, India, and Thailand – monitors calls in real time for fraud risks including synthetic voices and AI face swaps, alerting users when suspicious activity is detected.
Pokdepinion: I was hoping Chinese smartphone makers don’t treat Apple’s UI design as some kind of heaven’s decree. Oh well.
