Niagara Launcher adding ‘Anycon,’ which applies Material You icon theming to all apps

Ben Schoon | Nov 14 2023 - 8:54 am PT

One of the best third-party launchers on Android is Niagara Launcher, thanks in part to its flexible and unique concept for the homescreen. Now, Niagara is launching “Anycon,” a new icon pack that applies Material You theming to all apps, regardless if it’s actually supported.

In Android 12, Google debuted Material You alongside a new option to have app icons on the homescreen adopt colors generated from the wallpaper. It’s a wild concept and one that was adopted in a lot more apps in Android 13. But still, most apps just don’t offer the functionality and, in turn, stand out like a sore thumb when you apply the theming.

Niagara Launcher is set to fix that with Anycon, a new icon pack option that will be baked into the launcher and will apply a themed icon to every app on your device.

The idea, as Niagara explains in a blog post, is to apply an icon to all apps. For many apps, there will be custom-made icons available, but for the apps that aren’t specifically themed, Niagara will apply a more generic icon. Email apps get an email icon, fitness apps a fitness icon, and so on. Common apps should always be themed, but this seems like a good middle ground.

We could use the same powerful algorithm we trained for over a year to categorize every app and assign them an icon based on their category. Email apps get an email icon, fitness apps a fitness icon, and so on. And that is exactly the reason why we named our icon packs Anycons. They support any app with a matching icon.

This isn’t quite as powerful as some other solutions, though. For instance, Nothing has a monochrome icon pack on its phones that can force apps to adopt a themed icon. This doesn’t always work, but it’s overall quite good. Google is expected to offer something similar on Android itself in the future. There are also methods for manually creating app icons to match Material You theming.

Niagara’s Anycons will be available to fit in with Material You, complete with wallpaper-generated colors, as well as in “Sticker” and “Watercolor” styles.

For now, this functionality is only in beta but will launch widely later on. Anycon will also be limited to the paid version of Niagara, which is $10/year.