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With Android 12, Google is broadly pushing the Material You design language across the system. One of the most exciting features of this redesign is the ability to dynamically adapt and optimize the colors in the UI to match your wallpaper. Announced at Google I/O 2021 alongside the release of the Android 12 Beta 1 last month, Google enabled support for this dynamic recoloring of the UI with Beta 2 earlier this week. It appears the company is now testing the new Material You theming in the Google Messages app.
A new update for Google Messages (version 8.2.042) is currently rolling out on the Play Store. An APK teardown of the latest version of the app revealed the first hints of the new theming system. According to XDA, this feature is working on devices running Android 12 Beta 1 as well.
As per the report, several UI elements of the Google Messages app can already dynamically adapt and optimize the colors to match your wallpaper. Those include the search bar, the floating action button, and the categories tabs if they’re available for you.
If you have seen the Google Messages UI on Samsung Galaxy smartphones, you might have noticed that it’s a bit different. The UI is more one-handed-friendly. It’s unclear if Google plans to bring this UI to Android phones from other OEMs as well or it will remain exclusive to Samsung Galaxies.
Along with the Material You redesign, Android 12 also focuses heavily on one-handed-friendly UI, perhaps taking a cue from Samsung. So it shouldn’t be surprising if Google Messages and other Google apps see some UI overhaul soon.
Google Messages adds support for Material You theming on Android 12
A couple of weeks back, Google was spotted testing this wallpaper-based UI recoloring on the Google Feed app. We knew it was part of the company’s broader Material You redesign that’s become a marquee feature of Android 12. This change was expected to hit more first-party Google apps and it has. Google Messages is the latest one to pick up the new theming system.
Note that this dynamic recoloring feature is not yet live on the latest Google Messages version currently available for Android 11 devices on the Play Store. The latest Google Messages beta on Android 12 also doesn’t yet dynamically theme the UI elements based on your wallpaper. So the feature is still in the internal testing phase. However, it shouldn’t be very long before Google rolls it out on the beta channel. We will let you know when that happens.
