One more dynamically themed icon for your home screen
If you’re a personalization and theming enthusiast running Android 13, apps not using dynamically themed icons are likely not on your home screen. Many app developers are slowly changing that for the better, adopting Google’s new design. The latest holdout to take that leap is one of the best email apps — Spark Mail. A new update now reaching users also includes several other UI tweaks.
The Material You themed icon tops the list of visual changes in Spark’s latest update. This means Spark joins the growing list of apps adopting the feature introduced with Android 12 that themes home screen icons to match your wallpaper. You can enable this Android feature under the Wallpaper & style menu available when you long-press an empty area of the home screen.
Secondly, Spark’s in-app user interface now relies more heavily on Google’s Material You guidelines. The fun with dynamic theming colors continues — the recent changes allow the app itself to change tint and accent colors based on your active wallpaper. You just need to enable the Match system colors toggle under the Appearance section of Spark Settings.
The update also takes advantage of Google’s new photo picker. This new implementation is more secure, shows you larger image previews in one list, and allows full-screen previews mid-selection. You can choose photos by category, and the app only gets access to the media you select to share.
We’re also seeing the arrival of a big benefit for multilingual users, with the ability to set an app language for Spark Mail independent of the default system-wide language. This can be done using your phone’s Settings app, or from within the Spark app. To use the latter option, open Spark Settings, hit the planet icon in the upper toolbar, and choose a language.
We’re happy to see Spark Mail adopting Android 13’s design language, but if you’re sick of waiting for all your apps to behave similarly, there’s a solution to get those dynamically themed icons early.
