Thread by @MishaalRahman

The Material You revolution won't be televised: According to an article from @AndroidPolice, GMS requirements will soon force device makers to implement a Material You dynamic theming engine such as Google's own "monet."

androidpolice.com/android-12-dyn…

Apparently, starting March 14, 2022, Google will require that Android 12-based software builds submitted for GMS approval implement a dynamic theming engine that generates the five dynamic color tonal palettes - each comprised of a set of 13 colors - from a single source color.

Google's "monet" was exclusive to Pixels when Android 12 launched, but the source code for it is in the upcoming 12L release, so OEMs can either rebase on 12L or cherry pick the patches for monet to their 12 builds.

Several device makers have already started to implement monet in their 12-based updates, such as Xiaomi and Motorola

https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1483495124386648071

While device makers probably aren't being forced to explicitly implement Google's "monet" implementation, "monet" almost certainly meets the requirements and thus most device makers will just use that. A lot of CDD/GMS requirements are enforced like that.

Basically Google to OEMs: "Hey, here's a new feature we're making you guys implement. You're totally free to come up with your own implementation so long as it meets X, Y, and Z requirement, but you could, you know, just copy our homework and get it over with."

The big takeaway from this news is that dynamic colors will soon be available on a whole lot more devices. This will hopefully incentivize developers to implement dynamic color support in their own apps: m3.material.io/styles/color/d…

Given the importance of this news, I think I'll blog about how Material You/dynamic colors work in more depth for this week's Android Dessert Bites, so...

esper.io/the-android-ed…

This is just a guess, but March 14th could also be the date when Google plans to release Android 12L, at least to AOSP. Not every Android partner will have pre-release source code access, so for them, they'd need to pick the patches for Monet from AOSP.

Hmm, though, Google could kill two birds with one stone and release the 12L update for Pixels as a Pixel Feature Drop. If so, then March 7 (the first Monday of March) could be the date of the release (assuming the update for Pixels lands on the same day as the source code drop).