From the makers of wallpaper-based themes, introducing: thumbnail-based themes!
With Android 12, Google is going all-in on its new design language, Material You. And we’ve talked about it a lot: Several Google apps have gotten redesigns based on it and one of its key elements/features, dynamic theming, which grabs a color palette from whatever wallpaper you’re using. YouTube has been lacking this kind of redesign to date, but in a recent update, it incorporates a new design element that — while it’s not quite the same kind of dynamic theming Material You is doing — is still pretty cool nonetheless.
We’re calling this “thumbnail theming” — instead of going the Material You approach of grabbing a color palette from your wallpaper, instead this takes its color from a video’s thumbnail, which it then uses to color certain parts of the player UI. It’s very subtle — it actually took us a couple of minutes to actually notice the change. But it’s there.
As some of you might have already observed, yes, YouTube Music has had something similar for a long while: In YouTube Music, the “now playing” UI gets its color from a song’s album art. And Android itself is also no stranger to this kind of theming — Android Oreo actually introduced colored notifications (which similarly grabbed a color palette from a song’s album art and applied it onto a music player’s notification controls) all the way back in 2017. Since Google is kind of doing this kind of stuff across the entirety of its interface now, it might as well embrace it in YouTube, as well.
Since this is not a Material You-related change, it’s also not related to the Monet theming system. This means that no matter if you’re on Android 12 or a lower Android version, you should still be able to see it — one of our tipsters managed to spot it on Android 11, and I’m getting it on an Android 10 device.
Make sure to update your YouTube app to see this change yourself.
Thanks: Nick, Ibrahim
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