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Developer recreates Android 12's Material You wallpaper theme, and it's even better

By Doroteya Borisova

Published: Jun 23, 2021, 10:56 AM

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Developer recreates Android 12's Material You wallpaper theme, and it's even better

Material You is just one of the many cool things Android 12 promises to bring us this year, as we found out at Google's I/O 2021 event. One of the biggest improvements on the aesthetic side will be Android's introduction of a new UI theming system, which can match up the whole look of your phone to whatever wallpaper you're using at the moment.

The new look is still being developed in its beta stage, visible inside the Android 12 beta. The Material You theme, in its current stage of development, can only change up the look of the system user interface and a few system apps, and third-party app developers have not yet been given the necessary documentation from Google to begin incorporating it into their apps, either.

The only way to get a glimpse of Material You while it's being developed is to download the entire Android 12 beta OS version onto a Pixel phone, if you use one—something which average users are strongly discouraged against, because unless you're a programmer and you know exactly what you're doing, it's a very easy way to seriously mess up your phone.

Developer Danny Lin has recreated the whole Material You theme, and made it available across all of Android

However, an enthusiastic developer by the name of Danny Lin has taken it upon himself to quench our thirst for an early glimpse of the new theme, by recreating the entire look in a way that surpasses anything that we've yet seen from Google's original version. Take a look for yourself:

Google's Material You wallpaper vs. Danny Lin's

Google's Material You may well be exclusively available for Google's Pixel line. At best, Pixel is sure to be getting it first, with other devices likely having to wait until next year, to get the upgrade. Danny Lin's version, on the other hand, has already been published and publicly documented for app developers to implement into their own work across all Android devices.

Lin's UI theme uses the exact same color targets as the Material You theme—or, if you don't feel like matching your wallpaper, you can also choose your own custom color theme.

There is a "colorfulness" slider to let you control the intensity of the hue, if the original match is a little too bland to your taste.

Lin's creation is open-sourced and is aimed at devices running iOS 11 at the moment, but is also compatible with older versions. Its coding or API's aren't associated with or dependent on Android 12 in any way, although Lin actually worked with Google for part of the development of Material You (or "monet," as it's been nicknamed).

Danny Lin's wallpaper can also change its color theme at 90 frames per second, which would go incredibly well with live or moving wallpapers (although it would be very taxing on resources):

Why bother inventing an entire UI theming system when Google is about to release its own in a few months, you may ask? Well, it could well be for the sake of experimentation. Lin's creation also has the unarguable advantage in that it is compatible with all Android devices, rather than just Pixel (like Google's theme).

You can also hardly argue that right now, Lin definitely has the color picking function on point, unlike Material You in its current beta stage.