For the first time, a fully open-source port of the popular Active Edge from the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 phones has been made available to the custom ROM community, thanks to the efforts of XDA Senior Member Jertlok and the Dirty Unicorns ROM development team. The latter took to Twitter to announce Active Edge's availability.

In addition to it being available for cherry-picking from the Dirty Unicorns Gerrit and Github links, release candidate builds have been made available for the Pixel 2 XL (taimen), the Pixel 3 (blueline), and the Pixel 3 XL (crosshatch). Just tap on the RC tab after following the link for your device. NOTE: It's very important that you have the latest vendor, bootloader, and radio images installed for your supported device before you flash any of these release candidate builds. The team doesn't officially support the regular Pixel 2 (walleye) but it should be no problem for experienced custom ROM developers to cherry-pick the commits and include the necessary libraries. I flashed the taimen build and recorded a demo of Active Edge below.

As implemented in Dirty Unicorns, Active Edge does far more than simply trigger Google Assistant-related actions like its proprietary counterpart on stock Pixel phones. It can also be used to take a picture, toggle the flashlight, clear notifications, show the volume panel, turn the screen off, show notifications, and show the Quick Settings panel. I'm personally hoping that either Jertlok or any custom ROM developers who use his work will eventually add an action making Google Assistant say "Ouch! Don't squeeze me so hard!"

Jertlok, the developer who first made this Active Edge port, had to do it the hard way because this feature was never pushed to AOSP (no doubt because its bigger brother is HTC's proprietary Edge Sense feature from the HTC U12 and HTC manufactured the Pixel 2). Jertlok had to decompile and reverse engineer Active Edge to make it available for custom ROMs, and he details the process in the Dirty Unicorns Github repo.


Source: Dirty Unicorns (Twitter)