Substratum To Ship Without Root In Custom ROMs Soon

Substratum's lead developer Nicholas Chum has announced that the theming service will soon work without root on custom ROMs that incorporate it. This move will definitely bring a smile on the faces of all the Dirty Unicorns (DU) fans, since the DU team had announced recently that they will be shipping their ROM without root starting from 11.1 iteration of the ROM. For those of you who have been hiding under a rock, DU had started availing the services of Substratum since their release of Nougat.

The fact that Substratum will work without root from now on does not in any way mean that the users of a non-rooted variant of a stock Android ROM will be able to theme their phone on the fly using Substratum. Only custom ROMs which include the support for Substratum in their code will be able to use the services of the theme engine without root.

Since we are talking about custom ROM fanatics here, most of us won't be hesitant in rooting our phones, but there are still a bunch of folks amongst us who don't wish to root their phones, but at the same time they wish to use custom ROMs for getting access to more features. Apart from DU, even LineageOS doesn't ship with root anymore. The Substratum team believes that this was a major reason why they decided to go rootless.

Substratum's legacy version however still won't be working without root. For those of you unfamiliar with this, as of now, Substratum has two different versions - Substratum OMS and Substratum Legacy. Although both the OMS and the Legacy variant are similar on most of the terms, there is a slight different between the two. In the Legacy version of Substratum, boot animations and fonts are not themed, while in the OMS version all the elements of your phone can be themed. If the ROM you are using doesn't have support for OMS, then Substratum will work in the Legacy mode and you will have to reboot your device once a theme has been applied. However in the OMS mode, a SystemUI restart is sufficient in most of the cases to apply a theme.

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.