Update on the Status of SystemUI Tuner

[Zachary Wander]

I'm slowly working on another redesign (yay). 

The current codebase isn't very open to expansion or fixes/workarounds regarding newer versions of Android. The redesign will still be free, of course, and will have quite a few changes. Most notably, the UI will look completely different, and it will be harder to accidentally change options. On devices running Android Oreo or later, it will also be possible to reset any changes made to Settings.Secure or Settings.Global. 

Safe Mode will also be removed/renamed to Persistent Options. Persistent Options are cleared on shutdown and reapplied on boot. If a Persistent Option is changed by another app, it will be reset to the value set in SystemUI Tuner. Any option will be able to be marked Persistent. It will also have an improved set of instructions for using ADB to grant permissions. All current features of SystemUI Tuner will be transferred over by the stable release, and there will even be some new ones. 

Finally, when I say slowly, I mean *slowly*. I do want to get a better version of SystemUI Tuner released, but as each new version of Android comes out and Google breaks some other hidden option, I'm the one who gets blamed. Simply put, it's discouraging. That doesn't mean I'm done with this app (obviously), but it is difficult to develop for something that gets a lot of unwarranted negative feedback.

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Most of that above was copied from my Twitter (https://twitter.com/Wander1236).

Let's get onto the extra stuff. In reality, a lot of the redesign is already finished. This was originally going to be for another, similar, project that ended up falling through. So instead of just abandoning the code, I'm repurposing what I have for SystemUI Tuner. You can find the source here: https://github.com/zacharee/Tweaker.

I'm hoping to have an alpha build of this redesign up soon. If you're a member of this group, you can sign up for the alpha here: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.zacharee1.systemuituner. The alpha will have missing features! Since this was originally for a different project, the feature plan was different. Over time, I'll work on adding back the more popular features of SystemUI Tuner that are missing. Please fill out this form for the features you use the most, so I know what to focus on: https://forms.gle/YkwQUBg4gHvsSAU26.

If you had trouble following the ADB instructions in SystemUI Tuner, then good news! This redesign also has a redesigned set of instructions. Scrolling text is more apparent, instructions are more verbose, and buttons are more obvious. Hopefully this will improve the user experience (and stop people from calling the app a scam because they can't read error codes).

If you're having a problem with the redesign (once it's released), start a discussion here. I'm not very familiar with Groups, but it seems like it will be more consolidated than a hundred emails about the same thing.

That's it for now.