Substratum Updated To Version 600, Adds Rootless Support, New Icons, Float UI & More

In the absence of the CyanogenMod Theming Engine (CMTE), Substratum aka OMS has emerged as the undisputed king of theming, apparently because there is no one else in the contention for the throne. Loads of development, empowered by the diverse inflow of ideas, has seen the ten month old Substratum take leaps of growth. The project has been received a lot of backing and support from the community. OMS has grown so much that even popular ROMs like Dirty Unicorns, AICP and Resurrection Remix decided to avail the services of the theming engine.

We knew that the rootless support for Substratum is incoming and to add on to it, we had seen the implementation of the per app theming feature. The latter feature has now officially been termed as FloatUI. The Substratum team have introduced both FloatUI and support for rootless ROMs in the recent update to Substratum. The version number has also been bumped up to 600.

The official changelog for the update can be found as follows:

- Completely brand new icons and animations, made by Kevin Aguilar and Anthony Nguyen

- Rootless, completely sandboxed. This means that the WHOLE APP does not touch anything on your device anymore other than internal storage for Interfacer to install applications on. Huge credits to Ivan Iskandar (for integrating changes to Interfacer, Substratum and platform!), George G., Randall Rushing, Surge Raval and many contributors in our [experimental.] chat!

- Streamlined the UI much more, introducing color previews in the Overlay Manager!

- Introducing, #FloatUI! Now you can toggle your overlays from any screen possible! (On Android N, there is an API bug where the foreground app MAY bug out to Substratum when a notification comes in. If it does, just toggle it back) [FloatUI needs additional permissions]

 

- Changed the strings to make more sense to the common user

- Redesign the Substratum Showcase UI thanks to Alex Cruz!

- Favorites icon actually gets saved and can be removed now for app shortcut

- Added community links to the navigation drawer for new resources from the community, featuring TheCyberFibre/XDA Portal of Punya Vashist, theme template redirects, Gerrit redirects and direct links to our G , Telegram chat and XDA support thread!

- Masquerade is now known as Theme Interfacer, reverse compatibility for ROOT-OMS7 has been dropped in its entirety.

- Users are no longer allowed to switch to AOPT (Cutting Edge) due to the nature of it being completely volatile in our development.

- Fixed an issue where there are some cases where themes will be uninstalled when updating from Play Store.

- Added a new changelog button for themers to utilize when launching their themes.

- Due to the sandboxed nature of Substratum, everything is MUCH FASTER than ever before. Overlays compile 2-3x faster including install time (depending on your device).

- Rootless Substratum means that we have dealt with everything in the platform end -- meaning this is SELinux Enforcing ready, with Bootloader Lock and such.

- The app has been completely optimized, when you first launch it, you will realize how fast it is now!

- Substratum now saves your position during a window refresh, so when you're enabling/disabling an overlay in Advanced Manager, it will not kick you back to home.

- Notifications now refrain your SystemUI from going into haywire mode, updating X amount of times - where X is the file % 200 count. This will allow the user enough time to be able to click the cancel button to stop the cache creation process.

- We only have two tiles now, Substratum Tile and FloatUI tile.

- Security mode for ROMs that ONLY want to enforce release-key Substratums! Meaning that if you install a debug key version of Substratum, it will be denied. This is toggleable in your Developer Options > Force Authorize every theme app. The app will request for Theme Plugin Mode the first time you start. It would be HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to use 6.0.0 plugin as the algorithm there is MUCH CLEANER. But you can obviously use the old algorithm - if you don't mind it being a bit IO heavy for your legacy themes.

- Supports the latest 7.0.2 Theme Plugins for themers!

- New languages added: Czech, Polish, Belarusian - all other translations updated (some may be lacking because I push updates like no tomorrow haha!)

In case you wish to check out a further detailed changelog, you can head over to Nicholas Chum's Google post here.

 

It is worth noting here that changes to boot animation will still require root access. Changes to boot animation of the system require changes to an encrypted data partition, which cannot be done without root. 

The legacy version of Substratum would still require root access. This is because the legacy variant of Substratum only runs on those ROMs which do not have the required OMS commits. To obtain rootless access to to the services of Substratum, ROM developers need to incorporate some newly released commits with 600th version of Substratum. The Legacy model will still not be able to make changes to the boot animation and the fonts of the system. 

Users have also widely reported about the improvements in the compilation time of overlays.

Source: Nicholas Chum

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.