Google's Material You was added in Android 12, and we saw that it was finally added to AOSP in Android 12L. Now that it's going to be coming to more OEMs, Google is working on improving it for the release of Android 13, and one of its first improvements looks like it will pack up to five additional color styles. These new color styles are called TONAL_SPOT, VIBRANT, EXPRESSIVE, SPRITZ, RAINBOW, and FRUIT_SALAD.

For a quick crash course on Material You, in essence, Google created a theme engine code-named “monet” that generates a rich palette of pastel colors derived from the user’s wallpaper. These colors are then applied to various parts of the system and their values are made available through an API that the user’s applications can call, thus letting apps decide whether they also want to recolor their UI. However, as spotted by Esper, it's actually possible to enable a whole new set of color options on Android 13 Developer Preview 2 right now through the use of adb. What each of these new color styles does is detailed below:

  • TONAL_SPOT: Default Material You colors
  • VIBRANT: Generates a more tonal palette with slightly varying hues and more colorful secondary and background colors
  • EXPRESSIVE: Generates a palette with multiple prominent hues that are more colorful than VIBRANT
  • SPRITZ: Generates a more low-color palette

Esper did not share information about what RAINBOW or FRUIT_SALAD does.

Images source: Esper

You can run the following adb command to set these tones on any device running the latest Android 13 Developer Preview, replacing "STYLE" with one of the above.

        adb shell settings put secure theme_customization_overlay_packages '''{\"android.theme.customization.theme_style\":\"STYLE\"}'''
    

Of course, it's possible that Google won't go ahead and implement these through a user-facing UI in the final version of Android 13. It's also possible that the company may be working on this for a future release, which is exactly what happened after we spotted that the company was working on scrolling screenshots meant for Android 11. That feature only later debuted with Android 12.

Nevertheless, unless Google locks access to it, you should still hopefully be able to access it via adb. If you don't want to bother with adb, though, you can use the latest version of Repainter which will essentially run those adb commands for you on your Google Pixel.


Source: Esper