Update: Its been 3 months since I wrote this tutorial when Android 10 was in beta stage. Now it out of beta and appearing on different devices now. I am updating the installation steps and you do not have to read everything written below, its outdated. Just jump to installation steps and what you need.

Before you jump to reading instructions, the most important thing I want to tell you is that you need ROOTED device in order to use substratum on Android Q Beta. With Android Pie google has blocked all ways of installing overlays saying that - The Overlay Manager Service (OMS) is intended for device manufacturer's use. OMS, in its current form, is not designed to be a generic theming feature.

With Android Q, google has changed many things most of them are regarding the internals such as dynamic system partitions. Magisk dev TopJohnWu has already succeeded in rooting Android Q and most of the device running Q beta can be rooted easily with magisk. Google already have implemented a system-wide dark theme and most of the apps are adopting the dark themes now. One might feel that this dark mode in Android Q has eliminated the need of substratum themes, this might be true to some extent but the variety of customization is more bigger with substratum themes.

I was using the Android Q beta GSI by erfan and found that due to some issues substratum and substratum lite were not able to install overlays. At this moment substratum app does not work properly with Q which may be rectified in future but for now I found a workaround to install susbstratum themes.There are not many Android Q compatible themes as of now. The only theme that I used on Q is ethereal. Join the beta of this themes to use the Android Q version.

Before you proceed to use this method I suggest you to use Substratum Lite app to install substratum themes. Try it once because it may work for you , if it does not work properly or the overlays not getting installed after building and reboot, then you can use this workaround to apply substratum themes.

What You Need

1. Substratum Lite
2. A device running Android 10 (Q) which is rooted with Magisk.
3. A android 10 compatible theme. Check list of Android 10 supported themes here.

Instructions


  • 1 • Install all required apps as mentioned above.

    2 • Launch Substratum lite and click on the theme.

    3 • Select the overlays you want and build them. You might see a dropdown selection just on top after clicking on the theme. Just select Android Q/10 from it, if its not there then ignore.

    4 • Reboot

    5 • Open substratum lite and in manager tab you will see all the overlays. Just enable them and your theme will get applied.

If you have any kind of question regarding themes you can drop you queries in comment section. You can join our telegram group https://t.me/thespandroid for any kind of support.