XDA Reducing Power: Experience the Dark Side of Android with Deep Darkness for Substratum

Monday, February 6, 2017

Experience the Dark Side of Android with Deep Darkness for Substratum

Starting out as a small modification specific to the Custom ROM 'BlissPop', Deep Darkness gained popularity to the point where XDA Recognized Themer _moelle decided to convert the modification into a full-blown Material Dark theme for the CyanogenMod Theme Engine.

With 500,000 to 1,000,000 installs on the Play Store, this theme can easily be tagged as one of the most popular themes out there.

Given the recent delay in development of the LineageOS Theme Engine, XDA Recognized Themer moelle decided to jump ship over to Substratum. He created a small private beta-testing group with around 60-70 members for Deep Darkness and I happen to be one of them.

Things to keep an eye out for will be the AOSP Keyboard which changes colors according to the accent, the minimalistic Quick Setting tiles, the custom animations and the beautiful boot animations.

Status Bar

One look at the status bar of Deep Darkness will reveal how unique it is. This is the very reason the status bar has grown to become the number one identifier for a person running Deep Darkness — when you look at that status bar, you know that Deep Darkness is involved. The Wi-Fi icon looks like a custom skin for the stock Spotify icon and the Network Indicator dots look similar to the ones on iOS. The icons that correspond to the apps in the notification area are custom-made too. Overall, the status bar can easily be coined as the essential-most part of Deep Darkness.

Quick Settings

The icons you see in the status bar (except the Network Indicator dots) make their way into the Quick Settings too and they look even better with the panels spread over 4 columns (most Custom ROMs have the option to increase/decrease the number of columns )

With the CMTE variant, there aren't any options to customize the look and feel of the panels. However, the Substratum variant contains a lot of options. See for yourself in the screenshots below.

Notifications

Notifications are laid out in such a manner that they compliment the background of the Quick Settings Panel. In short, they're absolutely minimal. The icons for each and every app notification follows the accent color and are custom-made. Deep Darkness makes scrolling through dozens of notifications much more pleasant. Moreover, with the Substratum variant, you get to choose whether you want stock, white notifications or dark/black notifications.

Settings App

The Settings app page is absolutely flat and minimal. Each and every icon present follows the accent color and the scrollbar does the same. The sections have been separated by italicized headers which go with the whole look of the Settings really well.

Navigation Bar

With Deep Darkness for Substratum, you get to choose whether you want to use the DD Navbar (which was first seen in the CMTE variant) or the Pixel Navbar. Both look really good with the theme applied. On one hand, the DD Navbar softkeys are dimmed out and dark and on the other hand, the Pixel Navbar softkeys are bright white in color.

Boot Animations

In the Android Community, XDA Recognised Themer moelle is known for the brilliance he's shown with his theme and icon packs. However, little did we know that moelle has a knack for boot animations too. After receiving positive comments from the people in his private beta group, moelle decided to create more and more boot animations and upload the short videos to YouTube.

For the sake of this post, moelle went ahead and created a video which combines and showcases all of them: