How to Set Up & Make Use of a Customized Virtual Hole Punch Inspired Notification Led on Your Xiaomi 12 Phones

So, Xiaomi has just announced its 2022 flagship phones, the Xiaomi 12, 12 Pro, and an even more budget-friendly 12X, and unsurprisingly, they don’t have a native notification LED light.

I mean, it’s not like we were even expecting one in the first place, right?

So, thing is, if you’ve got your hands on any of these phones, and you feel like tinkering with them a bit, today I’ll be showing a cool trick that lets you use their camera hole-punch cutouts as a customizable virtual hole punch inspired notification LED.

Here, check these out.

Or, even something like this.

They look cool, right?

Sure, I know they do.

So, in just about 15 min today, I’ll be showing you exactly how you can replicate those, on your Xiaomi 12, 12 Pro, and 12X smartphones. #enjoy.

Read also: How to set up a customized virtual hole punch notification LED on your Xiaomi Mi 11 phones.

How to set up your customized virtual hole punch notification LED light on your Xiaomi 12, 12 Pro, and 12X phones

Step one

First thing first, quickly head down to the Play Store and download this app called the “AOE: Always On Edge” app, or better still, you can do same by simply hitting on the download link below.

Download now: AOE: Always On Edge custom notification LED app.

Step two

When you’re done downloading and have installed the app, go ahead and open it, and accept the terms and conditions which will be presented to you, and once you’re done, you should be taken right into the homepage, and it should look something like this.

And as you can see, it comes fully loaded with a host of setting options which we’ll be going over, one after the other during the cause of this tutorial, so with that being said, let’s start with the first one, which is the permissions.

So, right on there on the homepage, simply tap on the first option there which says “Required Permissions“, and when you do so, you should be taken straight to a new page that looks this way.

And as you can see from this page, the permissions are divided into two types, the “required“, and the “optional” permissions, and as you already guessed, required are the ones that are necessary for the app to work properly on your phone, while optional are the ones you can choose or choose not to grant, depending on what you intend to use the app for.

But for the sake of this tutorial, simply set your permissions the same way I’ve set mine from the screenshot below.

And after doing that, make sure that your settings are saved before leaving the page.

See also: How to enable and use your own customized hole punch notification LED light on your Xiaomi Mi 10 phones.

Step three

After saving your settings from Step two above, now go back to the app’s homepage, and this time, tap on the second setting option you see labeled there as “Edge Lighting“, and when you do so, you should have an even newer page with its own set of individual setting options, and it looks this way.

It is here that we’re going to be spending most of our time, as it’s from this page that we’re going to be doing the most setups for our custom hole punch notification LED light on our Xiaomi 12 phones.

So, quickly go ahead and tap on the first option labeled there as “Main Settings“, and you should have a new page that looks this way.

This page lets you set how you want the app to work on your phone, whether “Independently“, which is the default method, or if it should work with your Xiaomi 12’s built-in Always On Display feature, and for this tutorial, we’ll be going for the latter.

So, simply expand the “App Lighting Method” tab, and select the “With AOD Tap To Show (Tap To Light)” option, same way as it’s shown from the screenshot below.

And in case you’re wondering, the reason why we selected this option is that, as you already know, Xiaomi only gives you one option as to activate the Always On Display feature on your phone, which is “Display for 10 seconds after tapping“, so, this is the only option that fits with what Xiaomi already has.

So, after selecting the option, please note that you must also go into your Xiaomi phone’s Always On Display setting menu and turn it on in case it wasn’t turned on before now, and also set it to “For 10 seconds after tapping“.

And when you’re done with that, don’t forget to save your settings on the app before leaving the page.

So, after doing all that, now go back to the previous page you came from, which is the “Edge Lighting” page, and this time, select the next setting option you see there, which is “App Settings“, and you should have a new page that looks this way.

From here, you get to set when you want the app to be activated after you’ve turned off your phone’s display, whether it’s when a new notification arrives on your phone, or some minutes after you’ve turned off the display, or even immediately you’ve turned off the display.

And for this tutorial, we’ll set ours to immediately we turn off the display.

So, quickly go ahead and tap the “When to turn on Edge Lighting” tab to expand it, and set the option to “Automatic, whenever I lock the screen“, as shown on the screenshot below.

You can leave the rest options on the screen as their defaults, and make sure you save your settings on the current page before leaving it.

See also: Got a Redmi Note 11 phone? Here’s how to set up your own customized hole punch notification LED light on your Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 smartphones.

Step four

After saving your settings from Step three above, simply go back to the previous page, and this time, tap on the next setting option you see labeled there as “Lighting Settings“, and when you do so, you should have a new page that looks this way.

This is the page where we’ll get to customize the actual hole punch notification LED light to be used on our Xiaomi 12, 12 Pro, and 12X phones.

The page gives you a lot of options like the notification LED style, position, size, color, effects, display speed, etc.

So, first of all, make sure that the first option on the page which says “Enable Edge Lighting” is turned on in case your wasn’t when you got there, but it should be turned on by default though.

And then after that, go to the “Enable Notch Support” tab, and tap on it to expand it, and you should have a list of options under it like this.

From here, change the adjustment type to “Adjust Manually“, and change the “Notch Type” to “O“.

After that, you can use the “Notch Width” and “Notch Height” sliders to increase or reduce the size of the notch, which is now your notification LED light.

The “Curve Radius” slider can be left untouched as it doesn’t really do much at this point, and the “Top (set 0 if not hole)” slider is used to move the notification LED light either up or down to align it properly with the hole punch cutout on your Xiaomi 12 phones, just in case yours wasn’t properly aligned before now.

Then from the three options labeled “Right“, “Left“, and “Center“, of course, select the one that says “Center”.

And once you’re done with all that, simply go down to the “Lighting Placement” tab and tap on it to expand it, and set the selection to “Around Notch Only“.

Doing this will remove the other edge lights that are displayed around the edges of your phone’s display, leaving you with only the only that is shown around your camera’s hole punch cutout.

And moving further down the page, you’ll get to the “Edges Style” tab, and it’s from here that you get to choose the lighting style for your hole punch notification LED.

From here, you get a handful of lighting styles that you can choose from, ranging from LED to Shine, Tides, Follow, Sparkle, etc.

But there is one unique style here which is the “LED“.

When selected, it opens up an entirely new list of artistic styles that you can choose from, ranging from 0 – 9, like the one shown below.

But it also disorganizes the positioning and size settings that you have made before to your hole punch notification LED, so you have to go back and redo those for just this particular style.

But aside from that, you can still choose any other style from the list, and they will all work and align perfectly with the previous positioning and size settings that you have made in the past.

And after you’ve chosen your most preferred style, you can keep scrolling down the page to edit things like the “Edge Color Amount“, “Lighting Effect“, and “Edges Speed“.

So, take your time and set things the way you want them to be, and make sure that your settings are saved before leaving the page.

And below is a full screenshot of how the setup was done from my end, and of course, you can use it as a template to set yours too.

Step five

Now, after saving your settings from the last step above, then it’s time to take the app for a spin to see if everything that we’ve been setting so far is actually working the way we want them to.

So, once again, make sure that you’ve followed every step written and discussed in this article so far, religiously, and that all your settings are saved, now you can simply go ahead and turn off your phone’s display.

Now, how the app works on your phone will be determined by how you have set it to.

If you had followed the way I did mine all the way from Step 1 – 3 above, and have set the “When to turn on Edge Lighting” to activate immediately after you turn your phone’s screen off, then you can simply tap on your phone’s screen like you will normally do to bring up your Always On Display, and you should see your new hole punch notification LED light shining around your Xiaomi 12’s camera cutout.

But if you have set yours to activate only when you receive a notification, then you have to look for a second phone to send a quick notification to your phone with, and when the notification does arrive, you can tap on your phone’s screen like you will normally do to bring up your Always On Display, and you should see your new hole punch notification LED light shining around your phone’s hole-punch cutout.

So, if it’s working correctly on your phone, then well done, but if it’s not, then that means you’re missing a step or two from the tutorial above, perhaps you have set yours to work differently, and you just have to figure that out yourself.

Extra features

So, aside from letting you set a customized hole punch notification LED light on your Xiaomi 12 phones, this app also has a couple of tricks up its sleeve.

The first one is called “Notification Ticker“, and what it does is, when you receive a new notification while your phone’s screen is on, it shows a brief preview of the notification using an overlay just beside your phone’s camera hole-punch cutout.

Like I said, this only works when you receive a new notification with your phone’s screen turned on.

The second trick is “Animated Wallpapers“, and as you already guessed, the app gives you a collection of nicely animated wallpapers that you can choose from to apply on your home screen, lock screen, or both.

To access these wallpapers, simply go to the app’s homepage, and from the list of options there, locate and tap on “Animated Wallpapers“, and you’ll be brought to this page.

And that wraps it up for today on how you can use the camera hole-punch cutout on your Xiaomi 12, 12 Pro, and 12X phones as a cool-looking customized virtual hole punch inspired notification LED light.

Kindly tell us if you encountered any issues while trying to set this on your phone by leaving a comment in the comments section below, and if you find this article to be tricky, but at the same time, fun, then kindly give it a thumbs up by sharing it, and as always, I’ll see y’all tomorrow, #peace out.

MORE GUIDES

• Xiaomi 12S Ultra vs MI 11 Ultra In-Depth Comparison: Which One Is Better?
• The Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 Review
• List of All Xiaomi Phones That Will Receive Android 9.0 Pie + MIUI 10 Update In 2019