One of the advantages of Android OS over iOs is customization. The EMUI 9 software running on your smartphone can be customized easily. The EMUI’s built-in theme makes it far easier to customize the background colour of your system UI components, frameworks and fonts. Samsung is one of the companies that offer wonderful themes to their devices and gives its users access to theme engine. Google stock android base do support theme engine but google does not expose theme engine to users, unlike Samsung that does that. The first support for theme came to light in Android 8.0 but it seems that the new Android Q will expand the support to a better theme with built-in customization options.
The Android 8.0 Oreo saw google adopting Sony’s latest theming framework during the release. Sony’s framework theme centres on a class called the OverlayManagerService (OMS). The “idmap” is used by the OMS to link a resource established in an “overlay” App with a source that has been defined in a target app. It means that the target app can be themed without the target App modified in any way. The idmap 2 was recently summited by Sony to AOSP. One of the changes we saw in the idmap 2 is the addition of overlay categories. Joining the overlays together in categories means that the system will automatically disable other overlays that are targeting the same App when a fresh overlay is enabled.
As of now, overlays are enabled in order of priority and so far, we have seen Google testing 3 overlay categories; font, icon shapes and accent colours. There were multiple pre – an installed overlay that allowed us to change the font, icon shape and accent colour when flashed on a Google Pixel 3 XL in the leaked Android Q build.
Check out the font, Icon shape and accent colour overlays that were pre-installed on the early Android Q build. The following was obtained;
Font
- Arvolato
- Rubik.
Icons
- Rounded Rectangle
- Square
- Squircle
- Teardrop.
Accent colours
- Black
- Green
- Purple.
Before you begin to think that Google is opening more theming capabilities in Android, also take note that we may not see any of these pre-installed overlays in the Android Q build. There are possibilities that Google might remove those overlays before unveiling the Android Q.
In summary, we are not saying that Google will allow for custom fonts, accent fonts and icon shapes to be installed but we only hope that Google will allow for more customization in the Android Q. What do you think?
