Developer releases Xposed for Android Nougat

Developer rovo89 has released a version of its toolkit Xposed for Android 7.0 and 7.1. It turned out to be difficult to get the toolkit to function stably on Android Nougat, so the release took a long time.

The main hurdle for Xposed on Android Nougat turned out to be the app jit compiler. In Nougat, the operating system doesn’t compile parts of the code until users call functions in apps, rather than at installation. As a result, the installation of apps takes less time and the ‘optimization of apps’ at the first start after an update is also gone.

Rovo89 explains in a statement to XDA-Developers that he has developed a method to keep the optimizations to the compiler intact, although Xposed normally used the older aot compiler to inject its own code. The toolkit does this by registering all calls that the software makes during compilation. As a result, Xposed can only prevent those calls, causing an app to use the code from an Xposed mod.

Installing Xposed requires version 3.1.2 of the Installer. Users must also have root access, but a custom ROM is not required. The installation file can be found in Xposed’s XDA topic. Rovo89 expects that the version for Android 8.0 will be much less work and can therefore be released faster.

Xposed is a plugin framework for modules that enable advanced tweaks on Android phones. For example, there are modules to set the language per application, to set themes in WhatsApp and to hide the fact that a user has root access, so that apps that refuse to function with root can still be run. There is a repository with a total of 1122 mods available.