Gadgetory

nine months ago the Paranoid Android team found some new life and began working on their next release the idea was to bring some fun new features that helped improve the user experience while maintaining all the things that made Paranoid Android one of the best AOSP roms out there instead of putting up builds as alpha and beta releases the team decided to forego those and go straight for a stable release that releases here and we're going to take a quick look at it floating mode is actually a floating window that you can use to view your applications without having to open the entire app this is useful for things like replying to quick messages or checking on something on the fly without having to stop what you're doing the good news is that the window is large enough to make it useful for practically any application with the one downside being you can't really move it around all that much there are three ways to make floating window mode happen the first is by long-pressing any notification it'll turn dark and then you'll see the option on the right side tap it once and the application will open in front of whatever else you're doing do note this does not work with all apps you can also go into the recent apps view and find the icon there each application has its own little box and the icon will be at the top bar next to the close button tap it once in the application will open in floating mode the third way is by far the easiest and it's a toggle in the quick settings called floating peak you enable it in the quick settings and then when you get a notification you can click on the heads-up notification to automatically open up a floating window once it's open you'll have full functionality across the entire application to do what you need to do once it's done you simply hit the back button and return to whatever it was you were doing before we found that if you don't have any applications open when you create the floating window it'll automatically open the most recently used application in the background just in case overall it's the best system-wide implementation of floating windows that we've ever seen and it's really easy to use or ignore it if you don't want it OTS or on-the-spot controls is something that Android tablets have had for a while already to some degree when you drag the notification shade down for the first time you'll be asked if you want to turn the feature on if you miss the opportunity then you can find the option by navigating to the system settings than to backup and restore and then finally to feature preferences this is a really simple feature the way it works is when you slide down the notification shade like normal you'll see your notifications like normal no magic there however if you slide your finger down over where the clock usually sits you'll be able to draw down the quick settings in one swipe it's true that this mimics the functionality of just swiping down with two fingers but that's difficult to do when you're holding the phone in one hand the only issue we found with it is if you're using larger phones and your thumb may not make it close enough to center to pull down just the notifications however if that does become an issue you can always turn the feature off otherwise we recommend you leave it on because it'll save you a couple of swipes once you get used to it in Android marshmallow you have the capacity to move your quick setting tiles around however if you want to delete them or add more you'll have to go into the system tuner and do it the hard way and Paranoid Android this functionality is baked directly into the quick settings you'll be able to move quick tiles around as usual but you'll also be able to drag them to the top and throw them away like you do with icons on your homescreen at the top of the status bar there is a plus symbol where you can see all the tiles that have been removed and you can rehab them to the quick settings at your discretion this is turned on by default and is usable immediately after boot so you can customize as soon as you want to of course there are plenty of features carried over from Prior releases that are still there now for instance paranoid Android has CyanogenMod themed support and virtually any cm13 theme from the Google Play Store should work on this ROM system-wide immersive mode is still present and you can set the status bar and navigation bar to disappear pretty much whenever you want it to it will reappear when you swipe up from the bottom or down from the top just like it usually does in any application with immersive mode this release of paranoid android also retains support for layers if you want to know more about rro layers we took a closer look and are diving into Android M series from last year and we'll have that linked up for you in the video description below if you want to know more as usual the power menu has been altered to include a reboot option a screen shot option and an airplane mode toggle you can also get reboot to recovery etc in the developer settings if you so choose interestingly the robbed doesn't appear to come with any root access by default you'll likely want to flash the latest supersu zip with the rum and gaps if you want to keep root it's also worth noting that there are additional features for oneplus and oboe owners such as gestures and more involved kernel features overall paranoid android seems like a very competently done rom it maintains a lot of the features that made it really good in the first place but it also adds in a few new things for people to play with we were especially impressed with how well the new features have been integrated everything feels like an extension of the operating system with a natural fluidity that isn't generally typical for a custom ROM it seems to work pretty well and we didn't have any force closes or performance issues but to be fair we've only been using it for a few days and your results could vary that said it is stable enough for daily driver use if you are interested if you're interested in the following devices are supported by paranoid android the Nexus 6p the Nexus 5x the Nexus 6 5 for the Nexus 7 2013 edition Nexus 9 the oneplus one the oneplus 2 the oneplus X and some various Sony devices if you want to try it out for yourself we'll have the download links listed for you in the video description below and that about does it for this one folks if you want to keep watching we have a video where J sounds up the best Android phones as of june 2016 linked up on the screen there and in the video description below don't forget to subscribe and keep it tuned to android authority because we are your source for all things Android thanks again for watching everybody and have a wonderful day