Dirty Unicorns May Come With Substratum In It's Next Release

Nougat based ROMs are already under works, in fact, as you read this, a ROM might be building on some server, some developers might be scratching their heads to fix bugs that haunt them or some flashaholics might be testing out some ROMs. Whatever might be happening right now, stable releases of Nougat based ROMs should be out soon.

Owing to the slow bringing up of the  CyanogenMod Theme Engine (CMTE) this year, Dirty Unicorns (DU) is now considering to move over from CMTE to Substratum for their Nougat based release of DU11.

A while back we had laid down the differences between the different theming options the Android development community has had for us. These include OMS/Substratum, Layers and CMTE. Brought up this year only, Substratum has now become the preferred option for many ROMs lately. Once Substratum emerged out of it's testing phase, it outrightly replaced Layers and CMTE in both AOSP based ROMs (such as Pure Nexus, ZephyrOS) and CM based ROMs (such as BrokenOS) this year.

Based on Sony's overlays, Substratum is the 'metamorphosis' form of BitSyco's Layers Manager. During it's metamorphosis, Substratum gained a lot of capabilities from over it's previous form. These include abilities to apply themes on the fly 'without the need to reboot' the device. A neatly designed UI makes getting familiar to Substratum a cake walk. Substratum also allows only themes downloaded from the Play Store to be used along with it. That is definitely a huge plus for the developers, since this will drastically lessen the number of themes installed from outside the Play Store. Hence to use a theme on a Substratum supported ROM, a user will have to go to the Play Store to install the theme. This will not just improve the download statistics which the theme developers can use to analyse their work but will also fill in some voids left such as download of paid themes from sources outside the Play Store.

But then CMTE has been out since a long time. Hence the number of CMTE supported themes is definitely multiple times Substratum based ROMs can currently run. But if a number of ROMs adapt to Substratum, theme developers will have to cater to the new needs as well.

Everything said and done, DU developer Alex Cruz aka Mazda has been in touch with the Substratum team for the incorporation of their theme engine in DU. The 'legacy' aka stable version of Substratum is currently present in DU's test builds as well. But it is still uncertain out of Substratum or CMTE, who will make the cut for DU11.

Krittin Kalra

Krittin Kalra is a 20 year old Android freak. Striving for passions, chasing down his dreams and living a life without regrets is his sole mantra. A bit moody, he also does custom ROM reviews for AndroGuider. Currently pursuing his B.Tech, he aspires to follow his heart.