How to Enable Android 12 ‘Material You’ Dynamic Theme Early On
Android 12, the next major update to Google’s smartphones, puts a lot of emphasis on design. Chief among them is Material You , a new design language that combines simple, eye-catching graphics with color themes that can be created from your phone’s wallpaper. You can try the new stuff you create in Chrome if you want to tinker a bit.
You will need Android 12 beta.
To try this feature now, you need to be using an Android 12 beta device because Android 12 actually scans your smartphone’s wallpaper to tell the color palette for the system’s user interface. This feature includes buttons, backgrounds, menus, and more; now chrome too.
To be clear, Android 12 is not yet available as an official release. The software is currently in beta testing with no official release date. For more information on downloading and installing Android 12 Beta on a Pixel or corresponding Android device, follow our instructions here .
Material. You are not working on the default Chrome app yet.
Your smartphone has Android 12 beta, download Chrome Canary . This is a test version of Chrome and currently has a dynamic theme creation feature. Fair warning, though: The Canary software is unstable as it exhibits new features that have not been fully tested for bugs. Just don’t expect Chrome Canary to perform as well as the stable version of Chrome.
After clicking on the initial registration windows, it’s time to get started. This option is currently controlled by two “flags”, which are basically hidden features that Google is currently testing. To keep things simple, you can copy and paste each of the following flags into the Chrome Canary url:
chrome: flags # theme-refactoring-android
chrome: flags # dynamic color-android
Insert the first flag, tap Default , then tap Enabled . Then paste the second one, tap ” Default” but select ” Enabled” (“Full”) . Now click on “Restart”. However, you may not see the changes take effect when you restart Chrome Canary; otherwise, force close the application and start it again.
You should now see the Chrome Canary UI change based on your wallpaper. It’s all pretty subtle, to be honest, but it looks nice. If you switch wallpapers, Chrome Canary will change its theme to match. It works with both light and dark modes, so those who like to view with a darker theme will be able to take advantage of this feature as well.
However, this is not yet 100%; context menus, for example, do not reflect the theme change, so your experience with Chrome Canary will not be exactly what we expect from Chrome with the official release of Android 12.