Material You upgrades its dynamic colors in Android 13 DP2
Android 13’s first Developer Preview didn’t exactly pack in new features and APIs to sink our teeth into, butAndroid 13 DP2is making up for it and then some. One of the biggest complaints about Material You’s dynamic colors is that for most wallpapers and themes, they’re too faded (or not pale enough). We know the process is much, much more complex than it seems and sat down withGoogle’s James O’Learyabout exactly how Material You and its dynamic colors work. And with Android 13, it seems we’ll get 300% more choices with Material You dynamic color styles.
While you’ll need to run shell commands to get them working in DP2, the four theme styleswe reported onback in January are there, just waiting to turn your soft system theme into something more vibrant. The system is still built around the Dynamic color system taking one color from your wallpaper and then spinning up a table of color values to plug in across the Android system, a growing number of apps, and your Material You-compatible widgets.
The Material You theme on your Pixel today? That’s Tonal Spot, the default theme that straddles the divide between bold and muted colors, and Vibrant is darn near identical to it, save for some slightly stronger accent color choices. I find Vibrant picks much more complementary accent colors as opposed to Tonal Spot’s more distant — and sometimes discordant — accent colors. Expressive goes even further with the outlandish accents, selecting colors not always in the wallpaper. This creates more contrast between assets like the start and reset buttons on the Timer widget and the numbers on the Analog Clock widget.
And then there was Spritz.
TONAL_SPOT
EXPRESSIVE
It’s a shame the most eyecatching style name belongs to the literally dullest theme. Spritz cranks down the saturation on the entire Material You palette, giving you greyscale values with the barest hints of colors mixed in to subtly complement your wallpaper’s colors. If you’re a monochromatic kind of person, this will turn off those garish colors and give you a consistent palette no matter what wallpaper you set.
Given thatDynamic color is requiredfor phones shipping with Android 12 and 13, the option for these four theme styles will hopefully allow users to get closer to their ideal theme without having to use root solutions or apps likeRepainter. (Not that Repainter isn’t fantastic, by the way, it is.) If you’re itching to get your hands on the new themes,installing the Developer Previewon your Pixel isn’t the daunting task you might think. From there, Esper has theshell commandsyou’ll need to set your style.
While we wait for Material You dynamic color styles to get a switch in the Settings app, we’ve got plenty of time to dig througheverything else Android 13 DP2brought to the party.
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