Google introduced the Material You theme with the launch of Android 12, which brought new colors and shapes to the operating system’s interface. Of course, this will not change with Android 13 either, because the color palettes are to be expanded even further. Now there is initial information and screenshots for the four new styles for dynamic theming.
The first developer preview of Android 13 should be published in just a few weeks, which is traditionally the most interesting version because it already has many innovations on board and sometimes shows things that are not implemented after all. However, the Material You design will not change, because the next major redesign can probably be expected with Android 14 – rather Android 15 – at the earliest. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
The dynamic theming of the Material You design will get four new variants with Android 13, which can already be seen on the first screenshots and their titles. Here is the list of the new colorways:
- TONAL_SPOT: The current default colors Monet chooses.
- VIBRANT: A palette similar to TONAL_SPOT, but with slight differences in supplementary accents.
- EXPRESSIVE: A wider range of colors, seemingly including some not actually in the background, but which complement it well.
- SPRITZ: a muted, desaturated, nearly monochromatic theme.
And in the following screenshots, you can see what these variants look like while still relying heavily on the color palette of the background image. It remains to be seen whether these variants will make it to Android 13, be supplemented with further gradations or perhaps even be supported outside of the pixel smartphones – i.e. based on the background image. Over the past few months, Material You’s algorithms have done a very good job and perhaps there will be a further focus on the bigger picture of the operating system.