When Samsung launched the Galaxy S6 earlier this year, the new flagship device represented a number of firsts for Samsung. It was the first Galaxy S device built with a sealed in battery and no MicroSD card slot, the first smartphone with a bleeding edge 14nm Samsung Exynos 7420 processor that offered exceptional performance combined with low power consumption. It also runs Samsung’s custom user interface overlay, called TouchWiz, which has also been evolved and refined with the Galaxy S6. Amongst the many changes and improvements to TouchWiz, Samsung have built a theme engine for the interface, which as we wrote about yesterday has been immensely popular with Galaxy S6 customers all over the world.
That the theme engine has proven popular ought not to be a surprise given that one of Android’s great strengths is the ability to customize the look and feel of the device. Android is flexible and mostly open source, which means that there are a great many developers out there with a different ideas as to how the device could look, feel and behave. We’ve seen custom ROMs supporting theme engines for some time, but it was not until this year that the bigger Android smartphone manufacturers started incorporating their own theme engines into the software. HTC, LG and Samsung offer the theming technology. In the case of Samsung’s S6 themes, we have seen over six million downloads.
Today, I am covering the story that well known icon designed Samer Zayer is working on a stock-looking theme for the Samsung Galaxy S6. Although the theme is not yet available from the Theme Store on the S6 device, we understand that it has been approved by Samsung and is presumably still being finalized and fine tuned. As you can see from the gallery below, the theme includes stock or near-stock icons for the applications that are bundled with the S6 including Messages, Clock, Dialer and Calculator. Samer’s work goes deeper as he has worked on the Settings menu and quick settings toggles, too. And the Material Design stock look might not be quite the same as getting your hands on a Galaxy S6 Google Play Edition, but it may come close enough to persuade a few more customers to pick the Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Active or Galaxy S6 Edge up.
