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Substratum Theme Manager Gets a UI Revamp & Performance Improvements

Substratum, a mainstay in Android system theming since the Marshmallow days, received a major design revamp this week along with some security improvements and a new default theme compiler to improve performance. The new design, first teased last month, has been long-anticipated and has finally arrived.

The improvements to the user interface (UI) are designed to make the app more user-friendly, and include the ability to show your installed themes in a multi-column grid to save some scrolling and the ability to return to the theme list by simply swiping down on whichever theme you currently have open. Below is a screenshot gallery of the new UI in action.

Here you can find basic information about the Substratum app among other things. Tapping on the “substratum version” (currently at version 930) will send you to Github where you can see all the latest changes. You can also set the number of columns to use for your list of installed themes or go back to the old UI if you prefer.

Here you can set the number of columns to use for displaying your list of installed themes.

Displaying your list of installed themes in two columns reduces the amount of scrolling you have to do to get to the theme you want (especially if it starts with a letter that appears later in the alphabet).

You can display your list of installed themes in up to four columns, but as you can see here the thumbnails for each theme were a bit small for my liking.

Here you can see all your installed overlays – while this feature was present in earlier versions of Substratum, but the app’s default display font makes the words look more compact.

The recovery screen lets you wipe your installed overlays and start from scratch. You can choose to wipe your theme, or just your boot animation, sounds or wallpaper.

Below is a YouTube video from nicholaschum showing off some of the animations.

When you open a theme, Substratum colors the action bar and the navigation bar to match the dominant color of the theme’s header image. One caveat applies though: when a transparent/translucent theme is applied, the Substratum app overrides such transparency with that same solid color. Substratum Development Leader nicholaschum assured me that the team is aware of the issue and is currently working on a solution. You can see the dynamic coloring in action in the screenshots below with no theme applied.

On the performance front, the default theme compiler was changed from the AAPT (Android Assets Packaging Tool) from the Marshmallow era to AOPT (Android Overlay Packaging Tool). When I asked nicholaschum about the difference, he said the latter compiler was built from Oreo sources, enabling it to compile more API-level specific resources such as the downloadable fonts API available starting in Android 8.0.

There are, of course, plenty of other changes introduced in Substratum 930, which you can read about in detail in nicholaschum’s Google+ post. There was another interesting statement made in that post: with Samsung beginning to roll out Oreo updates to its latest devices, the Sungstratum plugin will soon no longer be necessary. Users will thus be transferred over to the Andromeda plugin for unrooted devices running Samsung’s stock Oreo ROM.

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