Substratum 621 Re-Introduces DirectAssets Mode and Prepares for Android O Support

We may earn a commission for purchases made using our links.

Substratum is a highly popular theme engine, one that you are likely familiar with if you spend any time browsing our forum looking at all the cool custom ROMs that are available. We’ve covered this tool many times in the past, and will likely continue to do so as the team behind the engine is constantly at work bringing new features and expanding the supported device list. Now, the Substratum team is announcing version 610 of the theme engine.

When Substratum was initially in development, it used to contain a feature called “DirectAssets mode.” The mode successfully killed the “resource cache” dialog and directly withdraws assets from the APK itself. The Substratum team mentions that this feature used to be contained within their early builds of Substratum, but they had forgotten to add it back. Now, Substratum version 610 reintroduced DirectAssets Mode, eliminating the time-consuming process of cache building altogether.

The update also prepares the popular theme engine to support Android O, though it hasn’t yet been actually tested on that software. Anyone who is able to root their device running the Android O Developer Preview is welcome to try out Substratum Legacy, though.

Other improvements include fixing potential memory leaks during overlay complications by stopping all the recreates previously present.

Looking to finally get started with Substratum? The team recently initiated a cloud database containing the names of all the ROMs officially supported by Substratum. You can head over to this link in order to access the list.

In another release ( version 611, to be specific) the compilation of themes with “type 3 spaces” and themes attempting to override target values was fixed. As of now, the ROM Support Check has been temporarily disabled. For those of you wondering what these types, namely type1, type2 and type3, are all about, here’s an excerpt from the app:

In yet another release (621, to be specific) all the issues with different kinds of types erroring out on the log have been resolved. The team has also fixed all the compilation errors related to appending new resources. A toast has also been added, informing you whether the overlay you’re compiling has a type3 mode or not.

The SubstratumRescue archives have been updated and it is recommended to wipe the current archives off of your /storage/emulated/0/substratum folder in order to update to the new ones. Henceforth, every time you leave a themes’ activity and processing, theme cache will automatically be cleared.

As Mr. Chum stated in a post on G+, Substratum is moving towards working on the UI changes we informed our readers about in a recent post of ours. It’ll be exciting to see what direction the new UI changes take with respect to Android O.