OneUI Tuner and Android 11 (Patreon)

With the release of OneUI Tuner 17/18, you can now use it on Android 11. You may have noticed not every option is available, though.

Unfortunately, many options, such as the custom clock format, likely will never be available on Android 11.

Why? Let's get into it.

OneUI Tuner relies on a framework in Android that allows you to override resources for other applications. In Android, resources are things like strings (text), layouts, images, and basically anything else that isn't code.

This overlay framework was designed to allow manufacturers to easily override options in Android, or add theming, without extensive modifications to the system. Substratum uses this same system to apply user-made themes to almost any rooted device.

Samsung is special, though, since it's possible to hack the theme center (which is how Synergy works) to apply resource overlays without root access.

Now, in an Android app, each resource has an ID, which is used to reference it in the app's code. You can also reference resources by their names in other resources, such as layouts. This is how OneUI Tuner was able to override the clock format in Android 9 and 10, for instance.

OneUI Tuner would generate a custom status bar layout resource that referenced System UI's resources as needed, and custom ones elsewhere. Unfortunately, this is not longer possible in Android 11.

While it's still possible to overlay basic resources, like text, dimensions, images, etc, overlaying layouts is generally no longer feasible. It's still technically possible, but with the way Android 11 handles overlays, OneUI Tuner can't reference resources in System UI from its custom-generated layouts.

There are some really hacky ways around this, like copying the needed resources directly from System UI and putting them into the overlay that OneUI Tuner generates, but this has the potential to break any other themes that might affect the status bar, and can be incredibly tedious to do.

So unfortunately, there's currently no plan to bring back the disabled options in OneUI Tuner for Android 11. I have been in touch with a member of the System UI team at Google, and it's possible that these options will come back in Android 12, but I can't make any guarantees.

In the meantime, though, there is some stuff to look forward to. I'm (slowly) working on custom navigation bar layouts. This should work on Android 10 and 11. While Good Lock's NavStar already has custom navigation bar options, they're limited and don't currently work on Android 11. Keep an eye out for testing versions of that!