XOSP-N Is Coming This Christmas, Features Overview

Santa is right around the corner. Out of the many gifts, he (or she!) will be bringing this year, he has something all the flashaholics would certainly love to unwrap this Christmas, it's the Nougat offering of the Xperia Open Source Project (XOSP).

The Xperia Open Source Project was originally started by Călin Neamțu, fondly known as 'nilac' in the development community, during the KitKat days back in 2013. The project was known as S  Reborn then. Based on CyanogenMod, S Reborn aimed at providing it's users with a minimal ROM along with multiple features from the Xperia UI. S Reborn received an incredible reception during it's KitKat operations. Come Lollipop, the project was unexpectedly halted, although some devices did have Lollipop based S Reborn builds. The project was revived when Marshmallow came calling in 2015, but following the resurrection, the project's name was changed as well. XOSP definitely had an incredible Marshmallow run, it made it's way to numerous devices in the form of both official and unofficial builds, with about thirty devices having the official support. Apart from the Xperia features, CM13 based XOSP also packed in certain unique blur customizations. These customizations were so much in demand that they were cherry picked by other ROMs as well.

Călin Neamțu has had worked solely over the last couple of months to bring up XOSP-N. The ROM has been in beta since the last couple of months and has been subject to internal testing both by ROM developers and maintainers. XOSP turned three years old recently and the Nougat based offering of the ROM certainly packs in some new stuff. Let's check all of it out!

This has been a season of new bootanimations for the custom ROM world. AICP and OctOS have already have had new bootanimations and XOSP now has a new one too. The image above depicts how the bootanimation will look like. To have an even better idea, check out this video.

XOSP-N will incorporate newer icons for the Album, Videos and Music app. Talking about apps, XOSP-N won't be featuring the Movies app from the Xperia UI. This is owing to the fact that Sony has surprisingly removed the app from the Play Store and many users had also reported about facing multiple force closes while using the Movies app on Marshmallow. During internal testing, these FCs increased even further, that's why the app has completely been removed from the ROM until Sony releases the Nougat based Xperia UI.

 

As far as equalisers are concerned, XOSP will be having it's own one this time. As compared to Marshmallow, ViPER4Android has been dropped. A separate installation of ViPER4Android will be made available though in the form of a flashable ZIP. The inbuilt equalisers can be accessed from inside the Music app.

  

The three screenshots above show how the navigation bar buttons have evolved on from Marshmallow based XOSP. The navigation bar in the second screenshot was earlier finalised as to the one which would be included in XOSP-N. I personally preferred that one too, however, in the end there was a change in plans. A new set of navigation bar icons was designed and users were asked to cast there vote on the navigation bar they would like to see in XOSP-N. Based on polling, the set of navigation bar icons in the third screenshot were finalised.

 

Official XOSP-N builds will be available for the following roster of devices:

• Nexus 4
• Nexus 5
• Nexus 5X
• OnePlus One
• OnePlus 3
• LG G2 D802
• Asus Zenfone 2 (Z008 & Z00A)

However this is only the list of the devices we have to begin with, official support would definitely be extended to even more devices once CM14 gets more stable and Nougat is available for even more devices. The officially supported devices will get weekly builds along with delta updates through XOSPDelta.

Krittin Kalra

Krittin Kalra is a 20 year old Android freak. Striving for passions, chasing down his dreams and living a life without regrets is his sole mantra. A bit moody, he also does custom ROM reviews for AndroGuider. Currently pursuing his B.Tech, he aspires to follow his heart.