Dirty Unicorns ROM Updated to Marshmallow, Brings Lots of New Features

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The sixth major incarnation of Android, version 6.0 Marshmallow has been out for a while. Custom ROM developers had a couple of months to implement the most innovative features to make their projects unique.

If we dive into XDA forums we can find thousands of custom ROMs. Every one of them differs here and there. We have exciting news ahead though, as quite a big player – the Dirty Unicorns ROM – has been updated to the most recent version of Android!

DU team took a different approach and didn’t focus on bringing up bleeding-edge features. Instead, we are getting a fully-baked project, with many interesting features including Fling, SmartBar and Pulse. Never heard of them? Here’s a short introduction.

“Fling” is a gesture-based navigation feature designed to unleash the power of gestures. The user is able to assign gestures to basically anything: applications, contacts, settings shortcuts etc. Fling recognizes the length of swipe or number of taps. Below is a video showing this feature in action.

“SmartBar” is another feature useful especially on devices without hardware navigation keys. The default navigation bar can be enhanced to handle up to 7 or 10 (depends on the type of device) shortcuts. Just like Fling, it can be either a shortcut to an app or activity. Possibilities are almost endless.

A third feature worth mentioning is “Pulse”. It’s one of the kind music equalizers which sits in the navigation bar. It activates when you play the music and is a pretty good-looking equalizer.

Last but not the least feature introduced in the newest Dirty Unicorns is “Themes Tile”. It’s similar to Cyanogen OS’ per-app themer, but it’s open-source and doesn’t require any third-party applications. This theme engine changes the look of the app on-the-fly and with the help of the community this surely will get better.

The list of officially supported devices is quite short and contains some Nexus phones, HTC Droid DNA, Moto X Pure, Nvidia Shield K1 and Oppo R7 Plus. Support has been dropped for HTC EVO LTE, Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and Sony Xperia Z. Official builds should appear shortly. Just follow the Dirty Unicorns webpage and XDA forums.