Google ‘won’t fix’ duplicate Material You colors from Android 15 and Android 14

Ben Schoon | Oct 18 2024 - 8:20 am PT

Strange behavior in Android 15 leaves Material You theming color palettes being duplicated, leading to fewer options, but Google says everything is “working as intended.”

The style options in Android have been using Material You for the past few years to generate a color palette that gets used throughout the system. Usually, around a dozen options are generated, but it’s been noted that duplicates have been showing up.

This was noticed by some in early Android 15 beta releases, and continues in the final release. Out of the dozen options, two or three, or more, might be duplicates. Android Authority highlighted the issue, claiming that it does not happen on Android 14. That’s not quite true, though. We went back to some older Pixels to verify this wasn’t happening in the past, and it wasn’t happening back in Android 13 or early Android 14 builds, but we immediately spotted the issue still happening on a Pixel 9 Pro XL running Android 14. So while this is relatively recent behavior, it’s not just happening in Android 15.

Obviously, that shouldn’t happen, but Google claims that it’s working as “intended.”

The behavior was posted to Google’s Issue Tracker, and marked as “won’t fix (intended behavior)” in September.

Thanks for the feedback. We have looked into the issue you have reported and would like to inform you that this is working as intended.

Why is this the case? It’s hard to say for certain. One theory we’ve got is that the page used for customization is set to show around a dozen choices, and if enough palettes to fill that entire list are not generated, it duplicates entries to fill the list. That’s still not great, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense.

Hopefully, Google will take another look at this in coming Android 15 updates.