[Samsung Galaxy S8 Themes, Apps, and Mods] partcyborg:
See, if you had the first clue what you were taking about, or even a general idea how any of this worked, you would realize how misinformed and silly you sound.

First of all, substratum did not "drain the **** out of" your battery. That is physically impossible, as there are no running services involved outside of the brief part where you use the app to install the theme. Nothing running means no battery drain. Computers are smart enough to change some colors and shapes on the screen without taxing a 3,000mah battery and an over 1ghz processor. Dont blame substratum because your system was screwed up and needed a factory reset.

Secondly, since you obviously have no clue how any of this works im in a good mood today so I'll explain it to you. Forgive the length, but there is a lot that appatrently needs explaining lol.

First, substratum isn't "charging people for an update." samsung oreo has a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT theme engine than samsung nougat. Why is this the case? Because with nougat samsung, in their oh so excellent wisdom completely ripped out and replaced the already existing theme engine in stock android with their own monstrosity. Why they did this is anyone's guess, but the answers definitely wont include words like "compatibility" or "logic", but it broke existing nougat theming. Given that the substratum app is basically a "theme compiler" app that builds layers used by the os, a substratum dev team figured out that they could compile substratum theme manifests into the magic proprietary samsung hybrid-engine tire fire that is the touchwiz nougat theme system. So they did, and it works. It doesn't allow native drop in of any configuration of system themes for aosp to the completely different tw versions, but it works, and works well provided someone has actually designed the theme layers with substratum in mind. At first those were few and far between and i too was frustrated at looking at countless themes on play store that wouldn't work on my phone, but now there are numerous beautiful options for the s8 and s8+. I count 21 different themes installed on my phone now, and i have a lot of them but not all.

After this substratum implemented theming for oreo, for which the entire ecosystem had finally solidified around the aosp theming engined (called OMS). They realized that with an app similar, BUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TO like what they had done for samsung, they could open theming up to all standard oreo devices. So they did, and it works, except for that you have to grant privileges via adb to make changes without root which dont persist across reboot (this would be googles fault), but it allows the entire ecosystem to use native theming, so Yay.

Come several months later, and oreo betas finally appear. As devs look at them to see what changes to sungstratum (the addon for samsung nougat) would be necessary, low and behold they find that samsung has apparently seen the error of their ways and left the oreo OMS theme system (almost) entirely intact! This is great news everyone thinks, because now even one off custom samsung devices can use the same thing everyone else does, and they're well be true interoperability across all of the Google ecosystem. Sounds great right? Except a handful of over opinionated under informed samsung users see this as not not upporting the substratum theme app on oreo, despite the fact that 1) absolutely zero off the code was compatible, 2) they already have an app on the play store that everyone else uses, so keeping a separate one made literally no sense, and 3) it was SAMSUNG who is responsible for all of this!

So if you want to be mad at someone, be mad at samsung. They are the ones who changed everything and screwed everyone using theming not their own.

Ot, yoy can not be angry for having to spend a whole $2 on the Andromeda app because you CHOOSE not to root (you don't need Andromeda if you have root access) and appreciate the fact that leas than a cup of coffee or less than your weekly allowance you can have a vast array of gorgeous themes to use on your $800 oreo device that you can use without theme killer hacks, or dealing with knox. Or, you can just do a little reading about the systems you have such underinformed opinions on, root your device and get this for free as well as a ton of other awrsome possibilities. When youve done a little homework and are to root, do a xda search for my nick with "rom" on the end to get started ?️.