Cyanogen Theme Showcase gives tweakers a new toy

CyanogenMod‘s core team might now be an “Inc.”, but they haven’t lost their sense of commitment to the community. The makers of the popular custom ROM has just released Cyanogen Theme Showcase on Google Play Store, making the fruits of their work on CyanogenMod 11S available to the wider Android community.

CyanogenMod 11S is the variant of CyanogenMod 11, as the name would suggest, that the ROM makers worked on for the OnePlus One smartphone. Among the new features teased quite early on is the new theme engine that made customizing Android devices not only simpler but also more powerful. Paranoid Android later announced in its first RC release that they had worked with Cyanogen and other developers to make the new engine compatible with the wider Android Open Source Project codebase. The culmination of that endeavor now arrives as the engine and its app, the Cyanogen Theme Showcase, make their way into Google Play Store.

Cyanogen Theme Showcase will be your one stop shop for all things theme-related. From here you can not only choose themes wholesale, but you can also mix and match pieces, picking out the icons, fonts, sounds, wallpapers, and even boot animations that you like. But the app has a few surprises up its sleeves. Even if you use a launcher that doesn’t support changing icon packs, Cyanogen Theme Showcase will apply icon packs nonetheless, so that you won’t have to choose between the utility of your favorite launcher and the beauty of your favorite icons. And in terms of icon pack support, it has quite a few, ranging from Nova, Launcher Pro, Go Launcher, ADW, and CyanogenMod’s own Trebuchet. But the new theme engine doesn’t only cater to the new but also to the old, supporting legacy themes, though only their styles, thanks to the T-Mobile theme engine.

The Cyanogen Theme Showcase app is, unsurprisingly, available for free, but the number of compatible devices are quite limited, possibly only a subset of those running CyanogenMod. Unsurprisingly as well, the number of complete themes are also few, but those numbers should grow as CyanogenMod continues to call out to designers to jump on board.

Download: Cyanogen Theme Showcase on Google Play Store