For many, Android 12 is Material You first and foremost, with all the other features and enhancements playing second fiddle to the new (and quite snazzy) dynamic theming and design language. Google’s already updating some of its apps to take advantage of the new changes, but one enterprising developer has taken the partially undocumented and non-final APIs into his own hands. Sleep as Android is soon releasing a beta version of the app with support for Android 12’s Material You, and you can download it a few days early here.
Urbandroid, the developer behind Sleep as Android, is usually on the bleeding edge of Android’s software changes. The app is frequently updated to take advantage of new features as they land, and Google has even been known to make changes with Urbandroid’s input. So, it’s not surprising to see the developer ahead of the curve in debuting Material You support nearly simultaneously with Google’s wider rollout of the feature in Android 12 Beta 3 just yesterday. However, the developer tells us that the new APIs are only partially documented and not yet final, which in practical terms means the app’s current Material You implementation could break or change before Android 12 is released to stable later this year.
But, in the meantime, Sleep as Android’s new dynamic theme support is pretty hot and a decent model for other developers to look at as they implement their own support.
In the developer’s words, the new beta version of the app is about 99% Material You-styled, taking advantage of multiple brightnesses and saturations of the accent color selected by the system based on your background — though it doesn’t seem to support the multiple distinct accent colors some Material You system bits use. (That could be a limitation of the current non-finalized APIs, for all I know)
The snazzy new dynamic theming extends from charts and graphs in the various sections that use those, to the dials that show your sleep score and associated metrics, in both light and dark themes. Readability and usability are both maintained, and it’s mostly as easy to parse data at a glance, though some of the light theme color combos can make it a little hard to read text. But this is still a beta and even the screenshots above show a few bits of the app that haven’t fully picked up support for the new color schema. Expect that to be tweaked at least a little over time.
Functionality in this latest version hasn’t changed, so far as we can tell, but looks clearly have. This makes Sleep as Android one of the first third-party apps to pick up support for Google’s new Material You dynamic theming, beating both the related API’s final release and Android 12’s stable rollout.
Urbandroid developer Petr Nalevka tells me that Google has also made it possible now to push apps targeting Android 12 to the Play Store, so a beta version with these changes will be rolling in the coming days. In the meantime, you can get an early look of the current release by downloading it here (direct download warning).
