Android 12’s Material You for Chrome OS is making progress

We already have dark and light themes on Chromebooks. Next up is adding Android 12’s Material You for Chrome OS. And Google is starting to make some progress with the latest code changes adding support for Dynamic Colors, as reported by 9to5 Google.

What is Material You?

Announced in 2021 for Android, Material You is Google’s way to smartly customize the colors of a device based on a user-selected theme. Material You modifies the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors of on-screen elements to supplement the theme colors. Essentially, it’s a way for your Android phone currently, and your Chromebook in the future, to be more personalized.

Here’s a short video from the original announcement to illustrate this:

What’s the progress of Material You for Chrome OS?

At the moment, Google has simply added support for dynamic colors. This color picker doesn’t actually get used yet based on your Chromebook theme, but eventually, that’s what will happen. If you’re into converting hex codes into colors, here are the current primary, secondary and tertiary colors in Material You for Chrome OS. You can click this link to enter any of the color codes and see the actual color.

primary0: '#000000',
primary10: '#041e49',
primary20: '#062e6f',
primary30: '#0842a0',
primary40: '#0b57d0',
primary50: '#1b6ef3',
primary60: '#4c8df6',
primary70: '#7cacf8',
primary80: '#a8c7fa',
primary90: '#d3e3fd',
primary95: '#ecf3fe',
primary99: '#fafbff',
primary100: '#ffffff',

secondary0: '#000000',
secondary10: '#001d35',
secondary20: '#003355',
secondary30: '#004a77',
secondary40: '#00639b',
secondary50: '#047db7',
secondary60: '#3998d3',
secondary70: '#5ab3f0',
secondary80: '#7fcfff',
secondary90: '#c2e7ff',
secondary95: '#dff3ff',
secondary99: '#f7fcff',
secondary100: '#ffffff',

tertiary0: '#000000',
tertiary10: '#072711',
tertiary20: '#0a3818',
tertiary30: '#0f5223',
tertiary40: '#146c2e',
tertiary50: '#198639',
tertiary60: '#1ea446',
tertiary70: '#37be5f',
tertiary80: '#6dd58c',
tertiary90: '#c4eed0',
tertiary95: '#e7f8ed',
tertiary99: '#f2ffee',
tertiary100: '#ffffff',

For example, to see the colors for the family ending with “60”, you enter the values from primary60, secondary60, and tertiary60. In that case, this is the color combination that your Chromebook would use for on-screen elements:

Of course, you won’t have to select any colors or hex codes once Material You for Chrome OS arrives. The colors will dynamically change to best match your device theme.

When should we expect Material You for Chrome OS?

Given that the dynamic color picker has only just been added, I wouldn’t expect the Material You for Chrome OS on MChromebooks feature to arrive for several months. And given that each month sees a new Chrome OS release, my estimate would be around Chrome OS 106 or so at the earliest.

We should see hints of Android 12’s Material You feature in the non-Stable Channel versions of Chrome OS within a month or two. And if you want to see them, keep an eye out for something like this experimental flag: chrome://flags#cros-next-mvp.

I say “something like this….” because, in the past 24 hours, the code change to add the above flag has been abandoned. So the actual flag name will likely be similar but different.