It is soon going to be a year since Google released the final version of Android Nougat and Xposed framework continues to be incompatible with the OS. Even after a year of work, we are yet to see even a beta release of Xposed for Nougat which has understandably frustrated many users. Now to pacify frustrated users and to keep everyone in the loop, the developer of Xposed, rovo89, has provided an update on the status of the framework for Nougat.

While the developer still has not provided any timeframe as to when we will see Xposed for Nougat being released, he has provided an overview of the changes that he has had to make to the framework and why he has not been working with other developers on it.

First, let’s talk about the changes. rovo89 says that right now he is “wrapping up some things” and “reviewing the big amount of changes” done in the last few months. Due to the sheer amount of changes in Nougat, he has had to reinvent certain parts of Xposed.

I think I got some really nice technique working to ensure that the apps can still be compiled with all the optimizations enabled. When a method is hooked, its callers will be deoptimized, but can later be compiled again (with optimizations, but also knowing about the hook). That’s possible in Nougat thanks to JIT, which wasn’t enabled in previous versions. So it’s not just a simple port of Xposed, important parts are actually re-invented.

As for why he is not working with other developers on Xposed for Nougat, rovo says that due to his unreliable timings and his “perfectionist” nature, he won’t be able to accept someone else’s code without close review which is a very time-consuming process. Plus, hardly a few people have gone through ART’s source code to be actually able to provide some useful suggestions and work on it.

In the end, there is still no timeframe as to when we will see the first version of Xposed for Nougat being released. But at least you can now be rest assured that rovo is still working on Xposed framework and has not abandoned the project.