Pixel Launcher Discover feed on Android 12 can be themed by Doodles in Material You-like manner

Abner Li | May 26 2021 - 12:18 am PT

At the end of last month, Google redesigned the Discover feed on Android 12. With today’s Doodle celebrating the Savoy Ballroom, some rather Material You-like theming is being applied to Google Discover on the Pixel Launcher.

Normally, Discover has either a dark gray or white background to match your system theme. The current Doodle is primarily brown/beige, and that color is applied to the entire feed from top to the bottom. It results in a rather distinct background for articles, videos, and the Web Stories carousel.

It’s live on the Pixel Launcher feed and not the full Google app where only the top of the screen is hued light brown. This detail is rather delightful and puts extra emphasis on the fact a Doodle is live.

The rounded corners, updated buttons, and use of transparency by this Pixel Discover redesign fits with Material You’s (MY) general trend of modernization. Another sign is how Google removed the summaries/descriptions underneath stories. This simplification to just a headline and cover image, in retrospect, is part of how MY design wants to make screens less dense and crowded.

Pixel Discover Material You — Android 12

Of course, the most prominent example of that is this background theming. Apps fully designed for Google’s new design language will adopt background colors from your wallpaper.

In today’s Pixel Discover feed example, end users are not specifying the hue — with that Material You capability not yet live in Android 12 Beta 1 — but it’s not too far a leap imagining that the default dark/gray themes could eventually be hued by a user’s set background. Meanwhile, that could be overridden by Doodles from time to time.

Another possibility is that the full beige background is just a bug with Google forgetting to limit the Doodle-based theming, like in the main app. Additionally, we’re seeing this on the latest Search beta.