Introducing LibreSubstratum: The open source Substratum alternative

Android’s biggest USP is the level of customization that comes with the device. In terms of customization, device theme settings play a very important role. So you may be familiar with Substratum. Until now, Substratum was the only way to properly customize your device and completely change its appearance. But sadly, it has recently been reported that the device has analytics built into the app, allowing apps to share user-specific data with developers. Most users don’t really care that much, but it may sound like a deal-breaker to them. But thankfully, there’s finally an alternative. Enter “LibreSubstratum” .

LibreSubstratum is an open source alternative to the official Substratum app. The app works just like the regular Substratum app. Based on Sony’s OMS (Overlay Manager Service), this app is compatible with all Substratum theme packages. Currently, the app has only basic overlay support, allowing you to compile and enable/disable overlays . That said, the developer has promised to include support for boot animations, sounds, and wallpapers in the next version. Although this app is still in beta stage, it works very well.

Unlike Substratum, the app currently only supports Android Nougat with full OMS support . This basically means that currently only custom ROM users can try out this app. I tried it out on a Moto X Play running AOSP Extended on Android 7.1.1, and to be honest, the app worked much better than the regular Substratum package. It’s much faster, themes are applied more fluidly, and overall everything feels simpler.

So what did Substratum think about this? The Substratum team was contacted and asked about the controversy surrounding built-in analytics. Their answer to that was:

“The analytics we use are not user-identifying, but are related to Google’s own device identification, such as whether you are using a Xiaomi device or a Sony device. The analysis you do is the crash report, and you only work from there.”

Now, all of this sounds satisfying, but in reality, there are a lot of things about Substratum that I don’t really like. For example, Substratum recently even introduced a paid closed-source add-on that cannot be replaced by an unofficial reimplementation. So I really like the direction LibreSubstratum is heading. But what about you? Are you planning to stick with Substratum or switch to LibreSubstratum? Let us know in the comments section below.