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While the Play Store contains many fantastic games for your Android phone or tablet, few support mods. A staple of PC gaming, Android games lag far behind their PC equivalents. However, it's not impossible, and if you're looking for ways to spice up your favorite Android gaming experience, there's a good variety of excellent moddable titles to choose from.
Vanced developers issue statement addressing wild rumors about the app's demise
Time to clear the air
While the story of YouTube Vanced (later just Vanced) seems like it's mostly over after the app shuttered operations, the folks behind the beloved mod apparently still have more to say. Several rumors have spun up regarding the app's demise, so on Saturday, the team behind Vanced posted an article on anonymous blogging platform Telegra.ph titled "Vanced Discontinuation." It purported to brief anyone "having trouble understanding the reason" why the application was discontinued.
Lenovo-owned Motorola might have been onto something with its modular phone accessories for the Moto Z series, but a combination of slow development of compelling products and poor availability leaves them in a precarious position. Nevertheless, the company is pushing on with the project in 2018 and has some new Moto Mods coming soon, plus a new design competition.
Google Wifi came out last year to join the increasingly competitive mesh router market. It has a competitive price compared to the competition, and we found the performance to be solid. It might be nice if it had a few more features, though, right? That's where the GaleForce project comes in. You can use GaleForce to tweak your Google Wifi and gain root access, but it's not for the faint of heart.
So you're one of the Android faithful, but you're also slightly interested in Apple's hardware? What can you do about that? One Nick Lee from development and design studio Tendigi came up with a solution that is both novel and terrible. It's an iPhone case that runs Android. Yes, really.
Some of you probably have the Nexus 6P now, or are expecting it to show up soon. Unless you ordered a 128GB, that is. Sorry. For everyone else, there's now an official build of TWRP for the 6P. However, like the 5X, there's no support for data decryption yet.
Android 5.0 brought major changes to the platform, and that made it hard to get the Xposed system tweaking framework functional. The project's developer has finally announced that Xposed for Lollipop is ready after months of betas and unofficial builds. That doesn't mean it's completely without risks, but nothing should be obviously broken.
The open-source nature of Android means that you can run the mobile operating system on just about anything if you've got the know-how. Case in point: A YouTube user named Josh Max has managed to get it running on his Texas Instruments TI-Nspire CX. If that name conjures up images of middle school algebra exams, it's because it's a graphing calculator. Check it out in action in the video below:
Xposed is a fantastic tool for modders whose phones aren't as popular as mainstream models and don't get as much ROM support, or if they simply want a few Android tweaks without flashing completely custom firmware. Unfortunately, both the Xposed Framework and the module you're using need to be updated with each major release of Android for the functionality to reliably work. That's now true for GravityBox, a popular collection of tweaks and mods bundled into a single module, and Lollipop 5.1.
For those who like to mod their Android devices, the Xposed framework is a revelation. You don't need to flash a new ROM, but you get a ton of customization options and system UI tweaks with relatively limited risk. After months of waiting, Xposed may finally be coming to Lollipop.
The impending release of the Google Now Launcher (GNL) presents a bit of a dilemma. The cool Google Now integration isn't possible with third-party launchers, but GNL doesn't have many customization options. If you're rooted, there is at least one way to get around that – the new Xposed GEL Settings, which as you can tell from the name, requires the Xposed Framework.
The Xposed framework is a major boon to those of us who use an Android device that doesn't have a lot of support from the custom ROM community. It allows a lot of the things you want in custom ROMs - visual tweaks, interface changes, behavioral and button functions, fixes for annoying bugs, and a host of other things - via independent modules, with only root privileges. The latest beta release from developer "Rovo89" includes support for Android 4.4 and a bevy of performance improvements.
It's not terribly hard to unlock and root a Nexus device, but mucking around with ADB simply isn't for everyone. If you want a somewhat more automated rooting experience for your 2013 Nexus 7, there's the Root Toolkit from Mskip. It's available now for all your modding needs.
If you've got a Galaxy Note 10.1 handy and a hankering for root-enabled fun, noted modder mskip has just posted an initial version of his extensive Toolkit for the Samsung tablet to the XDA developers forum. We've seen these before for all kinds of hardware, most recently the Galaxy Note 8.0, and they're great as a one-stop shop for advanced user operations. The toolkit requires a Windows PC, but beyond that it's got everything you should need to start rooting and modding the Note 10.1.
A new CyanogenMod feature is currently under review, and it looks staggeringly cool. Developed by Nebojsa Cvetkovic, this addition would place a new camera tile in the Quick Settings panel. Tap it, and you get a live viewfinder capable of taking snapshots right from the notification shade.
Create A Killer Retro LCD Android Theme With A Few Quick Downloads
Readers of a certain age will remember the way LCD screens looked back in the early 90s. We'd never heard of color LCDs – that would have been witchcraft
Readers of a certain age will remember the way LCD screens looked back in the early 90s. We'd never heard of color LCDs – that would have been witchcraft plain and simple. LCDs were dingy little grayscale things that you saw on clocks and mediocre handheld games. Still, there's nothing like some nostalgia in this age of pocket-sized supercomputers, right? MyColorScreen user z3u5 posted a classic LCD theme for custom Android launchers recently, and it's a seriously cool effect.
Stop holding your Nexus 7 in your hands like a chump and check this out. These industrious modders have built and installed complete Nexus 7 mounting systems in a Subaru STi and Toyota Celica. The Toyota owner even created a launcher skin to go with the mod. The skin, of course, is based on Knight Rider (seen below).
Onandroid Allows Live Full Nandroid Backups Without Rebooting Into Recovery
If you're going to be messing around with custom ROMs at all, it's a good idea to have a nandroid backup at the ready. A recent backup can save you a lot
If you're going to be messing around with custom ROMs at all, it's a good idea to have a nandroid backup at the ready. A recent backup can save you a lot of time and heartache if things end up going sideways. However, backing up your system used to mean rebooting into recovery and waiting for 5-10 minutes while everything progressed. That's not the end of the world, but every barrier to backing up makes people less likely to do it. With Online Nandroid Backup (or Onandroid for short), you can get a full backup done within Android itself.
Just after expanding Nightly support to Samsung's Epic 4G and a slew of LG handsets, the CyanogenMod team has brought nightlies to a handful of Xperia devices, including Coconut (the Xperia Live with Walkman), Iyokan (the Xperia Pro), and Satsuma (the Xperia Active).