Descendant X custom ROM for the Xiaomi Mi A1 and Mi 9 adds “Guardia,” a background permission monitor

The open, no-walled-garden design of Android gives users the freedom of customization. Thanks to the vibrant aftermarket development community, Android users can enjoy plenty of features that are otherwise not implemented by Google or OEMs. Take the example of Android’s new advanced permission management control system called Permissions Hub— something that was present in early leaked Android Q builds but Google didn’t ship in public releases. The relevant code snippets do still exist in AOSP, which have later been forked by the LineageOS team, and now it is accessible to regular users via LineageOS 17.1. XDA Senior Member Dil3mm4 has now taken another shot at enhancing the permission mechanism in their own way. Dubbed “Guardia”, the new background permission monitor is part of the latest build of their custom ROM, Descendant X.

For those not familiar with Descendant X, it is an Android 10-based Generic System Image (GSI) maintained by Dil3mm4 that has its roots in the AOSP GSI by XDA Recognized Developer phhusson. Descendant X is also available in the form of device-specific ZIPs similar to any other custom ROM. The developer has yet to update the GSI builds with Guardia, but you can access the permission monitor feature right now by flashing the newest Descendant X package for the Xiaomi Mi 9 and the Mi A1.

Descendant X Download and Discussion Thread: Mi 9 ||| Mi A1

Mi 9 XDA Forums || Mi A1 XDA Forums

Users can find Guardia under Settings > Privacy. After turning on the function, Guardia will start running in the background and notify you of apps requesting permissions. You can customize the alert types for different scenarios (e.g. location access and camera), and even place Google apps and/or system apps into an allowlist so that you are not getting hammered by hundreds of such informative but annoying alerts.

Given that Google is going to introduce a plethora of OS-wide permission related changes in the upcoming release of Android 11, we hope the developer will further improve Guardia by integrating the component on top of those revisions.

Apart from the background permission monitor, the newest build of Descendant X (version 10r40) also brings in July 2020 security patches, a handful of ClockFlow themes, and the fan-favorite notification ticker. Here is a video showcasing all the changes in this release: