Monday, March 20, 2017

Android Dev Weekly 001: XOSP Weeklies, BlissROM Update and Substratum News

We’re glad to announce the initiation of the “Android Weekly” series, encompassing updates from all over the Android Community. We are going to go off a tangent and try something new with this series, bundling smaller updates and development news.

As of now, BlissROMs, XOSP, substratum, GroundZero ROMs and ResurrectionRemix are the projects we will be focusing on. Hence, you will be seeing articles informing you of significant developments from each of the above projects quite often. If you want your ROM or project featured, send us a tip or send a private message to one of our editors, and we’ll get back to you!

By tracking and curating the major developments from the projects mentioned above, Android Weekly aims to bridge the gap between developers and users with short weekly updates.

XOSP to discontinue revision-based updates to accomodate weeklies

At the moment, XOSP is experiencing a re-base led by Călin Neamțu. Taking the re-base as an opportunity to change a few other things up, XOSP will be discontinuing “RLs” and “revisions.”

For those of you who are not familiar with the update scheme, here’s an excerpt:

Revisions include small changes such as bug fixes and minor improvements. Usually, three revisions lead up to a release. Releases are the main “stable” builds with all the planned features implemented and of course,bugs fixed.

The reason this update scheme will be discontinued is a shift of focus towards providing builds on a weekly-basis. As a consequence, Team XOSP will be synchronizing weekly builds and changelogs with the Android Weekly series.

Current state of Bliss: A weekly update on BlissROMs’ development

Over the week, BlissROMs has accomplished a lot. For starters, they brought in certain developers who helped Bliss port features from their CAF branch to AOSP and x86. Anyone and everyone willing to help are invited. As their CAF branch is already leading by  about a 1,000 commits, it has officially been bumped to 7.2

Bliss has resolved all the issues involving servers and the gerrit is now open to the public. The same applies to the download server.

A new wallpaper application is in the works, too, which will repeatedly feature illustrations and wallpapers dedicated to BlissROMs. The OTA application has been reworked for Nougat and there are a lot of featured planned for it.

One of customworx's walls for BlissROMs

One of customworx’s walls for BlissROMs

Rootless Bliss x86 EDU versions for x86 and x86_64 devices have been uploaded. Packing rootless substratum and a lot of kernel improvements, the system is getting better and more compatible for the classroom environment.

Also, Team Bliss has been working with the developer responsible for “Taskbar”, which might as well be the default launcher henceforth. As it enables enhanced freeform window support, Taskbar has reportedly worked as the default launcher for a few test builds.

Substratum

At the moment, whenever a certain user installs a new theme, the procedure of “cache building” is instantly carried out. However, in themes like Swift Dark, the process just took ages to finish.

Considering this as a cue for showing some more developer expertise, team substratum went ahead and completely disabled the process of rebuilding and/or building cache. The change they made impacts every single aspect of the theme, from the font to the boot animations.

This is how it currently looks

This is how it currently looks

Also, the substratum application experienced quite a few changes recently. The one change we’re highlighting is the addition of useful links to the sidebar. You can now reach their Telegram chat, their G+ Community, thecyberfibre and the XDA Portal straight from the application.

We would like to take this opportunity to link you, the readers, to the substratum sub-forum for XDA developers. If you have any questions related to the application, that’s where you should be.

PureNexus

Quite fortunately, PureNexus will be joining us on the Android Weekly series henceforth. We’re excited to partner up with new project teams.

Pure Nexus just released their March security update builds, featuring inline Google apps for all devices (to eliminate bug reports and have one less zip to flash) and rootless Substratum support. Additionally, the whole source got a re-base, cleaning up code and removing repos that are no longer necessary.

Conclusion

Look who it is!

Look who it is!

Concluding, we would like to let you know about the new GroundZero ROMs sub-forum, and give a shout-out to ResurrectionRemix as it was featured on the OnePlus forum. Congratulations, Team RR!

Featured image credits: Flickr

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