Material You is Google’s new design language, based around custom color schemes pulled from your wallpaper for all of your apps. It was introduced to much fanfare in Android 12, but it looks like it will soon make its way to more Google products. Chrome OS appears to be gearing up to bring full Material You theming to all the best Chromebooks and Chromboxes.

As spotted by 9to5Google, a new flag has appeared in the Chromium Gerrit that points to the addition of Material You for Chrome OS. The description for this “ChromeOS Material Next MVP” flag reads as follows: “When enabled, runs ChromeOS in Material Next MVP mode.” This Material Next mentioned here is Google’s internal codename for Material You, as it’s the latest iteration of the company’s long-standing Material Design. Meanwhile, MVP is a developer term short for “minimum viable product,” meaning a software version that’s basically a working prototype. This suggests that Google is going to introduce elements from its latest Material Design iteration slowly, rather than just flipping a switch to enable it fully right from the start.

In the Gerrit, a discussion revolves around the topic of dynamic colors, suggesting that Google is first looking for a way to enable a quick option to change interface colors on the fly based on variables. It seems like the colors might initially not be based on your wallpaper but rather on a color mixer in settings or elsewhere, which indicates that Google first has a lot of groundwork to cover before full Material You comes to Chrome OS.

Our mockup of the Chrome OS wallpaper picker app with transparent Material You theming

It’s clear that this is just early evidence of Google preparing Material You for its desktop OS, so it might still take quite some time until it becomes available to users. As with any under-development feature, it’s also possible for Google to go back to the drawing board or make substantial changes before anything ever goes live.

Google is already in the process of adding dynamic theming to Chrome OS, too. The company was only recently spotted working on a new wallpaper picker that sports some serious Material You vibes.

Thanks: Hamzah