Dirty Unicorns Decide On Substratum Over CMTE

A few days back we had reported that the Dirty Unicorns (DU) team was debating over CMTE and Substratum as the theming service for their Nougat based release of DU11. The debate has been sparked by the unexpectedly slow bringing up of the CyanogenMod Theme Engine (CMTE) this year.

Dirty Unicorns have now picked Substratum over the likes of CMTE. Describing the move, Alex Cruz, Dirty Unicorns' developer, wrote:

The team discussed it. Many of our developers took a look at the code and really liked what they saw. Sony has done an amazing job with OMS (Overlay Manager Service) and Nicholas Chum has done an equally amazing job with his Substratum app. So it was a easy decision. We picked Substratum because is the smarter play for us right now and likely future cycles as well.

We still have a soft spot for the CMTE but we don’t make decisions like this based on emotion. We make decisions that are good for the project and its future. Add in the controversy surrounding CM lately and you can see what we see.

Substratum like the CMTE is fully open sourced. Is very welcoming of improvements, bug fixes and just overall contributions. The DU team is excited for this and we look forward to it! We really can’t say enough nice things about it.

In case you are wondering how this change will effect DU, well, practically nothing much is going to change. DU will now just come with Substratum, instead of CMTE. However, it will still pack in the same love and the great features it had earlier. Add on to that the accelerated growth at which Substratum is expanding, we, the users, can certainly expect more theme developers to get their hands dirty in Substratum. Almost all the AOSP based ROMs have now relocated their base from Layers over to Substratum, so in case you have been cribbing over the fact that CMTE has more themes available for it than Substratum has, well then chill out because it's only about time that Substratum will catch up with CMTE in that department.

However, it will certainly be interesting to see what happens to the DU Certified app. At the moment, the DU Certified app showcases those CMTE themes which meet certain guidelines laid down by DU such as the quick settings panel must be completely themed, Dirty Tweaks must be fully themed as well and there are many more guidelines to add on. Whether DU Certified will be retained for Nougat based DU11 or whether it will now account for Substratum themes (instead of CMTE ones), that remains to be seen. However we certainly hope for it to be retained, given the fact that DU Certified did provide us with some great themes after all.

Substratum will be merged into DU's sources after Nougat 7.1.1 and the December security patch have been added. Since, Nougat 7.1.1 is already on the roll, we can definitely expect the AOSP sources of the same to be released within the next few days. If all goes well, we might be having the first official release of DU by the end of December. That's not an official ETA, that's just what I'm expecting. Flashaholics indeed prefer to have an unofficial ETA instead of an official ETA I guess.

Source: Dirty Unicorns

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.