XDA Senior Member Misterjunky has posted his custom rom for the T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+. The rom is based on the latest BOH6 firmware for T-Mobile users and contains a long list of feature and mod additions, minus the carrier bloat.
Join us in a fun Sunday Debate on Force Touch. Come with your opinions and feel free to read some of our thoughts, then pick your side or play devil’s advocate to get your voice heard and engage in friendly discussion. You can read our food-for-thought or jump straight into the fray below!
Force Touch is a relatively simple technology from the end user’s point of view, but the actual process going on behind the screen is much more interesting than people give it credit for. We detailed some of the mechanisms and its benefits, as well as possible applications, on an analytical feature, and now that the Huawei Mate S (which we tried out!) is officially bringing the technology to Android in all its glory, we think it’s time to have a debate on how it can be beneficial to Android, and if it’s worth the trouble.
Force Touch on phones basically allows your screen to directly measure the force applied upon the glass, and the standard can also be used for different kinds of feedback. The two well-known players bringing it to mobile, Apple and Huawei, have mostly relegated the functionality as an extra layer of gimmicky input, but there are other ways in which it can provide a better user experience. One of them is through enhancing the UI, particularly Material Design and its many layers of depth. We will explore some of those thoughts below, but if you want to simply jump to the comments and discuss, we ask you:
Force Touch can synergize well with Material Design, because Material UIs have several layers and depth with many floating elements. Things such as the Floating Action button could thus have Force Touch read the amount of force you are applying onto the drawn object and react accordingly, and then realistically bounce back to normal as well once your finger leaves the screen. Things such as the ripples on list items could also be tied to the force of your touch to give Material interfaces a more lively, organic and responsive feel to them. Finally, Force Touch can speed up certain UI operations such as long-press, which is time-bound, and instead replace that with a force-press that allows you to access menus without waiting.
Moreover, force-feedback in some Force Touch implementations can trick you into thinking you’ve clicked a button, and this could give physical feedback to plain glass, solving an age-old problem of touchscreens. Lateral-force haptic feedback can even trick your brain into interpreting vertical movements and texture, which would play amazingly well with the actual material part of this UI standard where cards move up and down.
A big problem with adopting Force Touch at large is that it brings in many additional components and extra manufacturing process for something that has no real practical value other than subjectively enhancing the user experience. At the moment, Force Touch is marketed with gimmicks such as weighing oranges on a display, and OEMs have not explored its vast potential. The devices that are bringing the technology are expensive flagships, and the Huawei Mate S, in particular, is from a not too well-known OEM and will only be available in select markets.
The additional cost to develop and manufacture this technology means that phones that bring it may be priced at higher prices than the affordable flagships trending today, putting the innovators at a price disadvantage (especially since it’s not a pragmatic feature). Some OEMs like Motorola already have patents for the technology and others can make use of it in future phones, but those that don’t have experience with the development or production of Force Touch might find themselves simply avoiding it due to the cost, which limits its adoption. All of this for something that doesn’t add much practical value and is mostly another way to embellish our interfaces and access menus… for now, at least.
On one hand, Force Touch could bring an extra layer of interaction, beauty, and feedback to the Android user experience. So far, none of its implementations have proved to be revolutionary, and the Huawei Mate S isn’t making enough noise to be noticed. On the other hand, the Android flagship market is in dire need of innovation and OEMs have to find new ways to justify flagship pricetags. They can bow down to the affordable flagship or try to push their phones’ user experience forward to lure consumers in a market full of alternatives. It’s a nice thing to have, but certainly not necessary. That being said, do you think it has the potential to grow?
XDA Senior Member lemon07r has brought f2fs support to the popular Sultanxda ROM for the OnePlus One. This derivative rom is separate from sultanxda’s work as it builds upon his base work. The rom also includes a CAF kernel, specifically the Tyr-CAF kernel.
If you would like to have an iOS style touch assistant on your LG G3, XDA Senior Member no14me has pulled the apk from a custom rom. The app should work on all LG G3 Stock roms, and also has a version emulating the iOS styling.
Recognized Contributor dr.ketan has developed an app allowing users to quickly enable all of the 25 quick panel toggles. The app requires root and works on the Galaxy Note 5, so go on over and try out!
Welivesecurity.com details the working of the ransomware, Android/Lockerpin.A discovered by ESET. The ransomware comes in the form of a lockscreen replacement app and relies on users granting it admin privileges. Once received, the app locks down the phone with a random pin and demands money from the user.
Working for XDA, my life almost revolves around Android. A few times a day I’ll make small changes to my daily driver or a big change to one of my test devices, and these generally are based on what comes through the office via the forums or what I find based on my current requirements. So without any further ado here are my devices, accessories and SIMs:
I’ll start by explaining my choice of daily driver, when I first started here at XDA one of the first pieces of news to cross my desk was a sales report for Xiaomi, the company had sold over 61 million devices in 2014. Needless to say, considering back the company was less than 5 years old, I was impressed. They had barely expanded to other countries and they were already selling more than most companies. Asking around the office, most people had heard of them but none of us had ever seen a device by Xiaomi, first-hand. Originally intending to continue using my trusty Note 2 after having tested the cheapest Xiaomi phone I could get imported, I took a look online and found that the Mi Note was being released imminently, and so a few weeks later I placed my order. It arrived, I checked its build quality and ran some benchmarks, didn’t like MIUI but did appreciate the toggle switch for root.
It went into a drawer awaiting a rainy day, over the coming months 2 things occurred which brought it up again to become my daily driver. The first being Xiaomi finally got around to releasing sources and the second being that a fully functioning albeit unofficial version of TWRP and a ROM very close to AOSP were both created for the device. Taking the stance that delays do occur and even Motorola has been known to be lag behind on source releases, I was grateful that they got around to it, let the matter drop and fell in love with the device.
As for how I have it set up, I have several apps on the go designed to make getting to what I need as fast as possible. Long pressing the menu hardware button pins the currently open app to the side (below, left) meaning I can quickly switch between several apps, this is achieved through the app Pintasking. A pie menu opened by swiping in from the right bezel opens up a customizable selection of my most used apps, this can be opened anytime. Finally, I have long since discarded my app drawer in favour of App Swap, a fully customizable app drawer that includes a search function that can be configured to also show contacts. Like the pie menu this can be brought up anytime simply by dragging up from the bottom of the screen. My 2 home screens are fairly simple preferring to keep them clean, on my primary screen I have just a Timely widget, to the right I have various media controls, a Wi-Fi calls toggle and the soundhound widget.
As a heavy user I initially had difficulties getting a full day’s battery out of my phone, it rarely dropped into Deep Sleep and wake locks were a major issue. Using Amplify to severely limit my wakelocks went a significant way towards helping this issue. Following this up with Power Nap to stop specific apps wakelocks, services and alarms whilst the phone was in standby went the rest of the way to getting optimal battery life. At this point my screen off battery drain was just 0.2% per hour and at the same time I am still able to receive emails, calls and messages, and certain other notifications.
I have heard talk recently on a subject that surfaces each time a new version of Android is inbound, that root is going to be unnecessary soon. That may be the case for users who are not major power users but instead have rooted because it’s deemed cool or they have just one app to run that requires it. For myself it is an integral part of my phone, I have numerous Xposed modules all geared towards making life just a little faster and easier. Of these the most noteworthy are:
As part of my job here at XDA, I have several social media accounts to control, I have started altering many of my devices to accommodate these. I run the app RSS 4 Wear with a 5 minute refresh rate for the portal feed (http://ift.tt/1NxnLu3) and a second that monitors new content submissions on Reddit that originate XDA. When the app finds a new entry in either feed, it sends a notification to my Moto360. In both cases the app allows me to read the content on my watch and then open it on my phone if I need to react quickly. As anyone who uses Instagram will be aware, using multiple accounts is quite difficult, without logging out and back in each time.
To rectify this issue, I installed Instwogram by forum member Me-Nex S. This app is almost identical to Instagram however by changing the meta data it allows you to run 2 separate versions, in this case one for each of the XDA accounts: Kickass_home_screens and Awesome_mobile_quotes. The first which showcases the best of our Post your Phone Home Screen thread and the latter which highlights the best quotes from our features. Coupled with the ability to use ARC Welder on Chrome OS to emulate these two apps and install them as extensions, managing them becomes a lot easier.
From there on I’m sure my device is like many others, I change my wallpaper frequently between photos I have taken and images from 500px found via Quickpic. My devices are an integral part of both my day to day activities and my career and I am constantly on the lookout for opportunities to make tweaks and improvements to my UX.
Do you have any questions about my set-up? Leave a comment below!
