Google’s Material You Dynamic Color wallpaper theme is one of the coolest features that Pixel phones will get a first taste of. The feature adapts to the color palette of the current wallpaper and applies it to system highlights and some apps too. It was initially teased at the Google I/O, later on, arrived on the Android 12 Beta 2. Codenamed “monet” the feature was missing from the Android 12 open-source release and most probably will not make it to the OEM skins of the OS.
That said, monet will make an appearance on the Android 12.1 (Android 12 sv2) version which will be the next iteration of the OS before an Android 13 release. Since a week or so, it is becoming highly likely that a mid-cycle Android update, as opposed to the yearly release, is imminent.
We may see the first final stable release with a point (“.”) update for Android in years – and it may launch with the Pixel 6 phone. Google has added the “monet” feature to the AOSP for Android 12.1 and it will be open-source in this future release.
This will surely see OEM’s jumping the bandwagon to ready their adaptation of the cool UI feature for their devices. Samsung might add wallpaper-based systems colors to a One UI’s future version or OnePlus having a unified Android skin that looks absolutely stunning.
XDA Developers with able input from kdrag0n has been able to get their hands on some of the dynamics of the adaptive theme algorithm in action. Screenshots of a device running the internal AOSP build of Android 12.1 shows how the feature will look in real.
Apparently, the color extraction clustering algorithm on the Material You UI determines the dominant and less dominant colors in the wallpaper to generate a palette of five colors and 12 shades of Material color. The five colors include two neutral and three accent colors which the Android 12.1 apps can call via the API to theme their own UI as well.
