Android 13 Beta 1: 12 new dual tone ‘Basic colors’ and Material You theme styles

Kyle Bradshaw | Apr 26 2022 - 11:04 am PT

As part of the first Android 13 Beta, Pixel phones now have 12 new options for “basic color” themes that aren’t based on your current wallpaper, along with a handful of alternate Material You color theme styles.

With Android 12, Google unleashed “Material You” on us all, a new design language that emphasized personalization through color theming. More specifically, you’re able to craft your own preferred theme by carefully selecting a wallpaper for your phone, the colors of which are used to generate a theme.

Within the Pixel series’ “Wallpaper & style” settings, you can also opt not to use your wallpaper’s colors and base your phone around one of a handful of pre-selected themes. For Android 13 Beta 1, Google has expanded the options available from four solid-colored themes to now offer 16 options. All of the new additions are also multi-toned, combining a bold color with a more relaxed complementary tone.

Joining the original options of blue, green, purple, and brown, Pixel owners on the beta can now choose two-toned shades of rose, brown, yellow, green, blue, purple, and lilac, along with five combinations that are a bit harder to describe.

Meanwhile, for those who do wish to take full advantage of Material You’s color scheme generation, Android 13 Beta 1 also opens access to over a dozen different generation methods. First spotted in action earlier this year, these other methods can make the colors chosen bolder or more subtle, to your preference.

From what we can piece together, you’re given a range of choices based on a particular set of colors in your wallpaper. For each set of colors, you get to choose among four different Material You color theme styles, though the fun names of those styles (Spritz, Fruit Salad, etc.) are not shown in the settings today.