The stock Android home screen has come a long way since the early days of the platform. The Pixel Launcher now sets the standard for what a conventional Android smartphone home screen/app drawer should look like. Back in January, Android 13 QPR2 Beta 2 was found to have a hidden feature flag that could allow the system to force an app icon to adopt a monochrome avatar, even if the developer hasn’t offered one. It’s no secret that a lot of developers still don’t support themed icons for their apps, but the ability to “force” the icon to adapt to the wallpaper’s color scheme sounded like a welcome change. Android expert Mishaal Rahman has now offered a detailed comparison of what some of these converted icons look like next to apps that already provide a monochrome icon.

As we can see in the screenshots below, it’s pretty clear that the forced monochrome icon solution (Left) is far from suitable now. Rahman was kind enough to offer glimpses of the app icons both under light and dark system themes. Some app icons, like Snapchat, appear completely out of place, especially under dark theme.

In an ideal world, all developers would provide a monochrome app icon, thereby offering a consistent experience for all users. Unfortunately, when Android’s algorithms take over, the converted icons don’t quite look the same. As a reminder, this feature is hidden under a feature flag called ENABLE_FORCED_MONO_ICON, described as "Enable the ability to generate monochromatic icons, if it is not provided by the app.”

So will we see this baked into Android 14 this fall? It’s too early to say at this point, though we’re not too optimistic. As Rahman speculates, this is likely something that Google is playing with, and the company may not bring it to stock Android.

But since it’s an open-source feature, phone manufacturers and custom launcher/ROM developers can certainly bring this to fruition in some form if they are motivated enough. Currently, apps like Pinned Shortcuts do a decent job of supporting themed icons for unsupported apps on Android 13, despite some obvious caveats.