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Code-named 'Monet', Android 12 is expected to offer an advanced theming system that will dynamically pull the dominant color from a given wallpaper and apply it across the Android UI.
When a handful of official-seeming Android 12 screens leaked last month I broke down what I noticed with my best fitting design hat on. I suggested dynamic theming was a possible explanation for what I was seeing but I was a heavy skeptic:
What I can't explain is how the home screen wallpaper image contributes to the color scheme. Just comparing it to the colors used across the UI, I would assume they're pulled out of the image. That's an easy, common thing for UI Designers to do. Could that be something Android 12 could do? Pick matching UI colors based on a given image? With these kind of results? That would be very impressive. My best guess is that this is a wallpaper that comes with Android 12 and this particular tan/pink combo is also a built in color/accent option.
Just over a week after I published that breakdown, a developer dug into the first Android 12 Developer Build and enabled Monet:
I've managed to get the new wallpaper-based theming system, Monet, working on Android 12 DP1. Here are some examples of predominantly purple and orange wallpapers: pic.twitter.com/jXHvWq7K81
— kdrag0n (@kdrag0n) February 20, 2021
I'm thrilled to have been wrong about this.
One of the questions I've been asking myself since widgets came to iOS—and the internet temporarily repurposed the word "aesthetic" to almost exclusively refer to iOS Homescreens—was "how will Android react to this?" It was the mobile OS to use if customization was important to you and widgets were already a staple of that offering. The counter punch had to be something entirely different. Monet is just that. It's such a uniquely Android feature and I love it for that. Can you imagine Apple allowing users to influence the default blue accent color used across iOS? You could argue there's precedent since macOS lets you change its accent color but that's thin ice to stand on.
As is the case with Android's Developer Previews, Google tends to keep features like this hidden, inaccessible, or omit them entirely from builds. Considering this is automatic and at the system level, I see no reason for Google to include this in a pre-release build sooner than later. My hope is that it's even more robust than what @kdrag0n was able to uncover when it rolls out. This will likely be one of the bigger user facing features Android 12 is marketed with, and for good reason.