Finally, a consistently themed home screen
Android 13 QPR2 Beta 2 arrived on Pixel phones this week, as long as they’re in the Android Beta program. There’s not much on the surface other than the very welcome addition of new emojis, but there are some tweaks lurking behind the code and feature flags. Here’s the option you’ve been waiting for: Google is experimenting with a flag that forces all apps on your phone to have themed icons.
as a speck Mishaal Rahman and on the Google News Telegram channel, the new option is behind a hidden feature flag named ENABLE_FORCED_MONO_ICON with the description “Enable the ability to generate monochrome icons if not provided by the app” . This does exactly what it means. When activated, Pixel Launcher takes regular icons provided by apps that don’t provide their own themed icons and converts them into solid color variants that can be themed according to your wallpaper. The result is a home screen consisting only of themed icons, even for apps that don’t yet support the option.
This method works best for simple icons such as MiX and Ring introduced by Mishaal Rahman. However, things get a little messy when the home screen consists of more stylized app icons, like Instagram with its colorful background. The example provided by the Google News Telegram channel shows this particularly clearly, with apps such as VK, Russian Post and mobile operator MTS looking out of place due to the grayscale background. If Google adopts this mandatory theming option, developers may provide their own appropriately themed icons.
The method Google currently uses also tweaks the shortcuts you add to your home screen. This is great for more general options, but if you have contact cards like Telegram that turn friends and family’s profile pictures into themed icons, this might seem strange. is clearly the work of
Google may have introduced this flag in Android 13 QPR 2 Beta 2, but this does not mean that the March 2023 stable release of the new Android 13 version will introduce this flag. Feature flags are used for experiments that may not materialize. Developers of large apps may be vocal about their apps not appearing the way they want them to. there is. Similar to the Forced Dark Theme option, it can be useful if you want all your apps to display with a dark background, even if it’s not provided. A dedicated dark mode itself.