One of the rumored additions in Android Q Beta 5 was a dark boot screen on Pixel devices, which would address a common complaint that rebooting your phone at night flashes you with a bright light. The feature has made an appearance in the latest beta, but not for all devices.
Proponents of dark mode, here's one more thing to tick off your wishlist for a black digital world. The upcoming Android Q Beta 5, which isn't yet available but has already leaked... twice, will offer a new dark boot animation when your phone is set to use the system-wide dark mode.
I normally like covering the Open Betas that OnePlus puts out for its devices. Ever since the program launched last year, it's shown that the "underdog" Chinese manufacturer is cleaning up its act regarding updates (the OP2 incident notwithstanding). However, this time around, I'm left facepalming. Why, you may ask? Aside from the normal bug fixes and optimizations, OnePlus decided to change the boot animation... and I think that it's pretty terrible.
Do you know what appears when your phone boots up? Nexus devices have this spunky way of showing off the Android logo. Other manufacturers have their own way of introducing their brand. Motorola tends to get particularly creative.
There's a new developer preview for Android M—oh wait, I mean Marshmallow, and that means lots of new features and tweaks to explore. Among the most obvious changes is a new boot animation that greets you upon starting up the device.
How many times have you looked at your Android Wear watch while it booted and thought, "Gosh darn it, that's a rrrrreally cool animation right there!" If you love that boot sequence, you probably get a tickle every time your battery dies or your watch updates and you see it starting up again. Boot Watch Face eliminates those requirements by using the animation each time you turn your watch on. Neat!
The super zen video above shows you everything you should expect from Boot Watch Face. It's very customizable with options to pick the clock hands colors and background (there's a cool "randomize" option too), change the needles' thickness (only when the watch is on — the ambient needles are very thin for my taste), remove the seconds ticker, and speed up the animation.
Were you upset that CyanogenMod changed its boot animation for CM12 (based on Lollipop) to a blinding white flash of branding brilliance? Then you really need to find better things to be upset about. Even so, it looks like the nightly builds released just a few days later have adjusted the boot animation once again, bringing it back to a more sober black. Here it is, for your viewing pleasure:
Remember the not-so-glory days of home computing, when each and every action taken before your operating system booted up was rendered on-screen in glorious greyscale text? Now you can re-live those days (or I dunno, just install a really useful pre-boot tool) with LiveBoot. This customized boot animation with its own configuration tool comes from prolific developer Chainfire, who released a free version with a Pro upgrade into the Play Store.
LiveBoot does nothing more or less than replace your stock boot animation (the thing that loops between the manufacturer logo and Android actually starting up) with a more useful alternative that prints out the logcat and dmesg on the screen.
Motorola's newer phones have a lot of little touches that improve the overall experience, one of which is the boot services app. Sounds boring, right? Well, it is most of the time. The exception being days like today when Motorola uses boot services to push out a new boot animation. This time it's got a World Cup theme.