Yo Linus why you be dissing the new HTC theme engine?

_ASSASSIN_ · March 1, 2015

I personally am looking quite forward to it. For once I think that this theme engine could possibly take off.

The first and most important factor is that it's is secure. HTC's theme engine is said to be based on RRO (Runtime Resource Overlay) contributed by Sony, which allows for minimal memory consumption and most importantly, security is much better than previously used AAPT (Android Asset Packaging Tool AKA what the old T-mobile engine used), which is what cyanogenmod uses in conjunction with RRO. So yeah, you can say that HTC's OS may be more secure than any cyanogenmod based ROM. 2nd thing is, since this is from sony and it's already added with AOSP, we may be able to see themes that are compatible with several other devices with different OS's if they don't stray away too much from the source. Not to mention it's a much more simple solution to a theme engine, only taking 200 lines of code versus around 14K for CM12's theme engine.

If you want to use RRO right now, here are a couple ROM's that uses Project Bitsyko's version of RRO

-SlimROM

-XenonHD

-LiquidSmooth

-Chroma (Nexus 6)

Also I just realized about all the jargin I used. I'll try and edit this further to explain myself.