Google had recently released the second Developer Preview of Android O and has made it available to the public, to the mass rejoicing of Android early adopters everywhere. But a lot of these early jumpers were met with a radically new UI in the quick settings pull down drawer – one of an “inverted” color. After a lot of digging by people at XDA as to why this happened, it seems that Android is finally bringing Sony’s RRO theming engine to the public.
After some investigation, the people over at XDA found out that the new “inverted” UI in Android O DP2 is connected to Sony’s RRO (Runtime Resource Overlay) theming engine that was used mostly in Xperia devices. The simple way to describe it is that you will be able to personalize a whole lot more elements of the user interface than just stock Android. Take a look at this Xperia Themes video to see RRO’s capabilities.
The investigation of the new “inverted” UI has shown that some of the elements in the default theme of Android O DP2 indeed mention RRO in their filenames. Checking deeper into the overlay code, the same mention of RRO is there. Pretty strange and interesting, eh?
What can we conclude from this? Well, the simplest conclusion is that Google may have tested integrating the RRO engine to Android O DP2. It is also possible that Google may decide to strip this off the final build of Android O. Or they may actually implement it. Either way, we know they’ve actually now tested it.
SOURCE: XDA
