With the right amount of tampering, your Android lock screen can become almost like a second home screen with tons of functionality that opens the door to endless customization. It’s really cool stuff, and Cyanogen wants to make this kind of lock screen the default for its custom version of Android 6.0 with a new module that it’s developing. With this lock screen, users will be able to do things like have their social media information pulled from their apps and displayed on the screen for quick access, or even use animated backgrounds.
Cyanogen, the commercial arm of the massively popular community Android software Cyanogenmod, is at it again. This time, they’ve cooked up an active lock screen module that can do things like display animations and pull pictures from social media. A demo was shown at 2015’s Big Android BBQ that demonstrated various features of the new lock screen, expected to make its debut in a near future iteration of Cyanogen-kissed CM13, a custom variant of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The first demo shown was a simple art parallax. A cityscape, drawn from vectored rectangles, was shown on screen. It bounced up and down, revealing and hiding more of its contents, as the screen was partially swiped. A full swipe cleared away the city scene to show the device’s home screen. The second demo showed an effect not unlike the stock Android live wallpaper that depicts leaves falling into a body of water, complete with ripples. Instead of leaves, however, delightful animated sea creatures frolicked about, interacting with the user’s touches and the resulting ripples in the water. The soothing ripple effect and the sea critters clear away in response to a full swipe, giving the user access to the home screen.
