Just last week, you might remember that Samsung had put out a call to developers and designers to submit their work to Samsung. This is part of the new theme feature that you see present on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. However, the themes aren’t really new to the Galaxy S6, as they did appear on some of the Galaxy A series smartphones earlier this year. But the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge are the first ones to be available worldwide with these themes.
Now Samsung’s official blog has published some more details about this theme service. According to Samsung, the Theme Service uses three things. That’s the device framework for theme customization, a theme editor, and a global store where these themes will be listed. Additionally, only the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge and upcoming devices will be supported. However, the Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy A5, Galaxy A7, Galaxy G7200, and Galaxy S5 in China will be supported as long as they are running Lollipop.
Samsung also says that the new theme editor is a very easy to use tool, and even supports drag to drop. They are touting the fact that you don’t need any experience to be able to use this software. The Theme Editor also allows developers to be able to preview key screens with their theme on them to see how it looks, while still in the development phase. There’s also a tool inside the Theme Editor which provides information about sizes of images, and urges developers to use optimized files. That way themes stay light and more efficient. Developers can upload the final APK through the Theme Editor tool for free.
The Theme Editor can theme the lock screen, home screen background, application icons, notification pop-ups, backgrounds and elements for 14 pre-installed basic apps (that includes phone, contacts, messages, email, music, video, calculator, Alarm/Clock, S Planner, Smart Manager, Settings, Memo, My Files and Voice Recorder), Sounds, and Fonts.
It appears that Samsung has made a pretty easy to use tool here for developers and designers to make themes for Galaxy devices. It will be interesting to see what kind of themes we get in the near future.