Android 12 biggest feature Material You dynamic theming system may finally expand beyond Pixel phones. If recent reports are anything to go by, smartphones of other brands may soon get to personalize screen colors, icons, shapes, and much more.
Google uploaded its Android 12 AOSP repository back in October but it didn’t make the full code available for its OEMs. It turned out Google kept the theming system ‘Monet’ (internally codenamed) exclusive to its own Pixel devices.
Of late, enough instances have come to light that indicate the dynamic color scheme system could finally make its way to phones other than Pixel devices. Mishaal Rehman, who follows the Android ecosystem closely and dabbles in Android device deployment and application management, tweeted about this development.
This is interesting. The source code for Monet (Android 12's wallpaper-based theme system) will be released with Android 12L, but based on this code change for the Material Components library, it looks like a bunch of OEMs are implementing dynamic color support themselves. https://t.co/Oufh9zxDnZ pic.twitter.com/9obGYbbMDCNovember 11, 2021
The details were revealed in a code commit in Google’s Material Components library, titled “Add supporting manufacturer list of dynamic colors.” The participating OEMs are OnePlus, Motorola, Xiaomi, Nokia, Sony, Oppo, and TCL, Lenovo, with many more joining in over the coming weeks.
Samsung is not on the list, even though the company has used a color-theming system in One UI 4 beta. However, Samsung may be using its implementation for Color Palette that differs from Google’s version.
How much support is available?
A report published on XDA Developers further indicates that Google has all but confirmed that it would add the code for Monet to the AOSP repository for Android 12, sometime after the initial release of Android 12.
However, it remains unclear how much support it will get from its OEMs, especially when almost every company has its design language.
Take, for instance, Oppo, which has taken cues from Material You in its ColorOS 12 but has done its version of dynamic themes implementation.
Similar to Android 12 Material YouAn interesting feature of ColorOS 12.You can freely extract the color of a certain area of the wallpaper for the main color matching of the entire system, which is awesome. pic.twitter.com/Rj5yz1hnz9November 9, 2021
This clearly indicates Oppo might not utilize Google’s Monet dynamic color theming engine. Oppo’s version uses manual customization where it allows users to choose four different accent colors from the wallpaper. The system UI then embraces those chosen colors and radiates to all the app icons, but Google apps such as Gmail, Google Maps, and more remain unaffected by this change.
As the report points out, the names of the OEMs have been spotted in the library and not in Android’s API, which means it could create issues for developers as their apps may not support dynamic colors for newly added OEMs without a code update.
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