Android 12's long-awaited "Monet" wallpaper theming system is a big part of the Material You redesign we've been anticipating, and as of Beta 2, it's here. Change your wallpaper, and system colors and accents change pick up on its cues to build you your very own unique matched theme, changing everything from background colors for certain UI elements to stronger accents and even some icons.

As prior leaks showed off, the new theming system can parse colors used by your background and pull a few for use by the system. In the examples above, you can see it adjusting the background color in the notification shade (though one example may be bugging out), as well as tweaking the media player background and quick settings toggles — and they're not just picking up on one single Accent color, either. Different elements are pulling different colors from a wide pallet the system seems to be generating from your background.

Colors extend throughout several parts of the system UI, including extensively inside Settings, where it tweaks the background, sliders, toggles, and icons drastically but tastefully (in my opinion). Google's first-party apps don't seem to make any use of it yet that we've spotted, but we know that's planned eventually. They'll probably need to be updated to pick up on the related system cues and APIs.

The lockscreen also takes advantage of these changes in some obvious and subtle ways, tinting the clock to follow the generated theme but also adjusting the background of the keyguard and its buttons slightly.

The changes are more subtle than the earlier, in-development leaks indicated. Google's toned down how strong the color influence is on things like backgrounds. The themes also likely extend further to other parts of the system UI, so be sure to check back in for more examples of that if we spot any good ones.

It's obvious in hindsight, but the system doesn't work quite the same with live wallpapers. It does choose new colors, but they seem to be almost at random, or based on something we can't quite figure out. In either case, don't expect them to mesh quite the same.

In a similar vein, though Google said we'd be able to choose our own accent colors, right now selecting a custom style with a different pre-set color doesn't seem to do much — and either way, it wouldn't let you customize more than one color with the current system, while this automatic mode seems to inherit multiple. Either we're still waiting on a different UI for custom color selections, or something else is going on.


For more about Android 12, check out our ongoing series coverage here, or bookmark our regularly updated changelog and check back in later. If you want to install the developer preview on your own device, find out how in our Android 12 download guide.