[Huawei Mate 20 Pro Themes, Apps, and Mods] kaibosh99:
EMUI sure is strange when it comes to support for themes or modifications of any kind to the interface. Without the 3rd party support of an entire host of apps to make changes actually possible, the stock 'theme app' is entirely useless. Okay, so you have to install a spammy app for theme support. Then you need to install another one for fonts, and to actually be able to change them. Then you install a few more, all of which can't directly do anything but inject imported stuff into the official app. Pro tip, you always need to kill the official app before launching it from these 3rd party apps - or the app won't see your new stuff.

That would all be fine, and manageable, but the way EMUI handles themes in general is too broken to bother. Their own official 'dark themes' are broken beyond use, and so are the 'PRO' 3rd party ones. There is no point in forcing a dark background to apps if you aren't going to ensure that the font colour of those same apps or EMUI dialogue menus isn't going to adjust to contrast it. In other words, you can really screw yourself over to the point where you can't even read anything to undo the damage. Crank your brightness to max if this happens.

Even that could be worked around with enough tinkering, but what *cannot* be fixed is the way EMUI handles the onscreen nav icons. For one thing, WHY don't these automatically slip away for ALL apps, and in the OS itself?! They do for games, and they most certainly do for any decent Rom made in the past five years. Nope, instead they are just stuck there like a sore thumb ALL THE TIME outside of games, and this makes something like the dock in Nova Launcher just look terrible. Yeah, and if you haven't used a Rom that makes these disappear properly all the time, wow you don't know how much better it is supposed to be.

That isn't the real problem, though. What makes all of this meaningless is that the OS/EMUI fails to automatically adjust the outline colour of these icons depending on what you are doing. With a gray or fire type theme, it looks fantastic on the homescreens. Sadly, anything you load that falls back to a black background for dealing with fullscreen/aspect ration issues makes the icons disappear altogether. There is no way to fix this, period. It is irritating beyond measure. Don't get me started on how broken that 'sorta fullscreen' implementation is, I can list a dozen AAA+ games for Android that result in you being completely locked out of bringing back the nav icons in either mode. Again, other Roms have figured this stuff out years ago, since Huawei knew they were going to have a wonky aspect ration and the need to dance around a notch... There is no excuse for this.

I am holding out hope for Roms now that we have unlocked bootloaders back on the menu, and what looks like working TWRP/Magisk support. In the meantime, I give up trying to make the phone pretty. I know I could hack and slash at various things in ADB to force fallback to 8.x style nav stuff/gestures along with various different launcher tweaks to get around this, but I don't need the headache. Come on Huawei, this is a flagship phone on what is supposed to be cutting edge and mature OS. Why do major pieces of the UI feel like drunken alpha release code?