Google I/O 2023 brought about a whole host of goodies, and one of the biggest surprise announcements was Wear OS 4. It's the latest iteration of the company's operating system for smartwatches, and it's built on Android. Despite being built on Android, WearOS 3.5 is based on the much-older Android 11. With the upgrade to Wear OS 4, it skips right ahead to Android 13, and what's more, from our digging, it comes with Material You support as well. We heard that Google was working on Material You support for Wear OS a couple of months ago, but Material You wasn't mentioned in the company's Wear OS 4 announcement yesterday.

On booting up Wear OS 4 on an Android Virtual Device, we noticed that much of the system has accent colors in places that aren't present in Wear OS 3.5, most notably in the quick settings. We were able to pull values from system_accent colors, and accent1 on our system image matches the accent color of the quick settings. accent3 matches the toggles in the settings, too. The hex color values pulled were #c1e8ff and #d1e5f4.

This is significant as while WearOS 3.5 was clearly inspired by Android 12's design language, it did not support Material You due to being based on Android 11. There are a handful of caveats to this, though, with the biggest being that it was extremely likely, with the news of WearOS 4 being based on Android 13, that Material You support was going to be included anyway. After all, Material You is baked into AOSP and has been since Android 12L.

The second caveat is the biggest, and it's that you currently cannot, to my knowledge, modify these colors. That may change, but as it stands, I have been unable to find a way to force the system to use other colors in place of these. It's likely that Google hasn't completed the implementation of it yet, but I expect that in the future, updating your watch face will result in colors being taken from it to use through the system, just like how it works on smartphones.

There are a few reasons that I believe Google will have working Material You in the final build, though. The first is that accent colors are already here, specifically in the quick settings. These were not present on WearOS 3.5, which suggests that Google aims for these colors to be customized in the future. The second is that the system_accent colors are read when the system composes Material You colors, meaning that, in theory, a developer whose app references the Material Design 3 API will inadvertently pull and use these values.

All of that ties into my final point, which is that they are currently accessible and in use; Google hasn't locked it down. Even Google's own isDynamicColorAvailable() method in the DynamicColors API simply returns true when above a certain Android version number, suggesting that Google wants this to be a unified experience on Android 13 and over. What's more, a Software Engineer working on the Android UI Toolkit mentioned on Twitter (via Mishaal Rahman) that the Wear Watchface API added the ability for watch faces to expose their colors to the system for use in a color palette.

We'll be keeping a close eye out for any further updates to Wear OS 4's developer image, and we're excited to hopefully be able to add a bit more of a personal touch to our smartwatches in the future.