Google is delivering its first significant visual redesign in years with Android 12, and along with it comes a theme engine capable of customizing your smartphone in just a few simple steps. Material You pulls its slate of color choices from your wallpaper to customize icons, menus, and more. With Android 12 Beta 3, you can finally choose a custom set of accent colors, though some might still find the possibilities just a little too limiting.
As part of today’s beta, Google has completely redesigned the background picker for Android, with a combined “Wallpaper & style” menu for changing all visual elements. Once you’ve set a wallpaper, you’ll have the choice of four unique groups of accent colors pulled from a backdrop. If none of the patterns are working for you, the “Basic colors” tab includes four extra shades, though you’re limited to blue, green, purple, and brown.
Android 12 Beta 3’s “Wallpaper & style” menu.
On less complex wallpapers, the options to swap between groups of accents are far more limited. Some backdrops only generated a single set, severely limiting customization. There’s no way to select four colors to use as a whole, so if you aren’t satisfied with Google’s auto-generated suggestions or the basic colors, you’ll need to swap wallpapers entirely.
Android 12 Beta 2’s wallpaper and style settings, complete with font customization.
This menu contains a couple of other changes, too. Toggles for themed icons — yes, it’s finally here — and dark mode are found underneath, as is the home screen’s grid size. It seems like the font and icon options from Beta 2’s “Style” menu are gone, and I couldn’t seem to find their new home.
It’s nice to see Google making Material You a little more flexible — that’s the whole point, after all — but it’s still not quite as fleshed out as any third-party launcher you’ll find on the Play Store.
For more about Android 12, check out our ongoing series coverage here, or bookmark our regularly updated changelog and check back in later. If you want to install the developer preview on your own device, find out how in our Android 12 download guide.
