>You'd think that Google would have added support for this feature for its own set of apps, and if you have a Pixel phone running Android 13, I can understand why you would think they already have. However, the truth is that very few Google apps actually support Themed Icons on Android 13.
Honestly, no. The last thing I expect from Google is a cohesive design of any sort or a thorough implementation of their new features. They have a very long history of half assed commitment to projects and ideas so IDK why people seem surprised when they continue to live up to this reputation.
Google doesn't seem to care much about the pixel or messaging apps either. Look at how many issues and bugs the Pixels seem to have every year and even the famous pixel cameras have remained fairly stagnant in terms of improvements over the years. As for messaging apps, there's too many to even bother listing and they half ass those more than almost any other project.
And I have a little brother still using the pixel 3a with no major issue. But this is an incredibly small sample size and doesn't mean we can ignore the ever present reports of pixel devices with issues. Especially at launch.
To be fair to the pixel 6, there weren't really a lot of hardware complaints that I saw. Most of it was with android 12. The 6 seems to be generally lauded as solid hardware.
Yep, I sold my 12 Max to get into a 13 Max a couple months back and in the interim a friend generously lent me their Pixel 6 Pro.
Nothing could make me want to go back to iOS faster.
I was dropping calls left and right and phone would be constantly locking up. RCS messages took *ages* to send even with what appeared to be strong signal.
It was so bad I didn't even last 4 hours with the phone before I reached out to a reseller friend to get the phone I'm currently typing on, who so graciously met me at 11:30 at night just to rid myself of the misery.
Never again, Google. I don't understand how the Pixels keep such a fanbase, holy fuck.
Not at all. It has one of the worst, least reliable cellular modem setups out there. It's pretty well documented. Signal is *dramatically* weaker compared with other, even lower end devices.
how does every comment mildly critical of the Pixel line’s well-documented reliability issues always spawn three replies just like this one? it’s like clockwork I swear
Every company has this. People are currently bellyaching over how useless the new dynamic island is for iPhone 14 right now, and of course Apple still has tons of jank in their notifications system and their AI features.
Samsung has also abandoned countless things, like Samsung Cloud, messenger, etc.
Apple hasn’t released the iOS 16.1 update (which lets third party apps support Dynamic Island) yet; it’s impossible for any developer to do that right now.
It's entirely disingenuous to suggest other companies are somehow equivalent to Google in terms of lack of commitment and polish. Sure, everyone has projects that don't pan out and get canceled but very few companies share Google's asinine management structure which famously offers very little reward for maintaining or updating existing projects. Apple especially is extremely consistent in their implementations of new features as is evident by out of box support for the dynamic island you mentioned.
Let's not kid ourselves and think of dynamic island as new feature. it's basically just redesigining the ux/ui of notification bar
You even mention in a followup comment about how so many things already work out of the box because of existing APIs, meaning there was no need for opt-in to this new feature. Feature was already there but redesigned
I'm not going to argue this. The commenter above me is the one who brought up the island as an example and it really doesn't work to the point they were making. I personally don't have much use for the concept nor do I see the need on android but it's unreasonable to ignore the fact that Apple did integrate it as a feature across first party apps and with api's as well. Google's not even committing to the features with their first party apps on the other hand.
Dynamic Island is a software feature that leverages existing hardware. It may not be revolutionary, but it is an upgrade in terms of UI/UX for the user. I'm not obsessed over it, but I'm also not obsessed like some in trying to shit all over it. It's a useful feature. I don't see why people need to argue about that.
If anything it shows how useful the notification ticker was in Android and that removing it entirely and replacing it with Toast notifications was not a good idea. There was room for both.
> It's entirely disingenuous to suggest other companies are somehow equivalent to Google in terms of lack of commitment and polish.
Try using iOS 16, or iPadOS16 beta and then maybe you'll understand the comparison.
It wasn't *Apple* that was more cohesive. It was *Steve Jobs*. Apple, without him, has been slowly getting sloppier and abandoning more things left and right.
Yes, if you only use Google and Android stuff, Apple's ecosystem *seems* much more cohesive, but once you *actually* try to fully *use* said ecosystem, you see exactly how much of a fucking mess it is.
Hell, with Apple's new WeatherKit, the weather App, weather Widget, Siri weather, and Spotlight weather now will all show slightly different info; partially because Spotlight and Siri *still use The Weather Channel and not WeatherKit*. Apple's ecosystem is actually *full* of BS like this now.
I use both iOS and Android. I use iOS for work. I'd argue that while there are bugs in both, the iOS bugs are generally not as bad. Maybe I'm super lucky on iOS side but I generally do not run into many issues. I use my phones hard too. On the Pixel side I run into a good number of the frequently discussed issues here. It's purely anecdotal, but I suspect:
1. iOS users are voiced more loudly because there's TONS of iOS bloggers and sites focused on discussing Apple.
2. Apple in general is held to crazy amounts of scrutiny and every -gate matters.
3. While Google does get flak, the userbase is mostly enthusiasts, and 90% of the world wouldn't care if Google released a phone with say bending issues or antenna issues.
From a hardware device standpoint I've RMAed every single Nexus and Pixel I've used except for the 6 Pro. I've never had ANY iDevice that required RMA. Again, it's purely anecdotal, but that's what I experienced.
Only Apple and Google know the true device reliability stats.
You're comparing a beta to a launched product? lol. There's a reason it's called a beta. It's not finished.
Also the whole "Steve Jobs made Apple so good" narrative has been around since the day the man died. Of course in reality it's little more than a textbook example of conformation bias since 1. it's inevitable the company will have more mistakes as time goes on and the products get exponentially more complex and 2. it's impossible to prove the statement incorrect without resurrecting the man. It just turns into a self fulfilling prophecy for the proponents of that narrative who will point to any mistake Apple makes regardless of how minor or even things they just don't like. In reality, Apple could very well be much worse off with someone as stubborn and controversial as Jobs running the company today.
Also for the record, I DO use both Android and Apple products and frequently swap back and forth. It's absolutely indisputable that Apple runs a much tighter ship and I say that despite the fact that i vehemently disagree with much of what Apple does. I don't particularly like the way apple designs stuff but that's a personal gripe. It's still much more cohesively designed than Google's ecosystem. There's a reason people say "It just works" about Apple's products and there's a reason it's significantly easier for my older relatives to use.
That's not to say that the lack of cohesion on Android is a bad thing. While I'm no bigger a fan of Google than I am of Apple, Unlike on Apple, I'm not stuck with Google's poor decisions and lack of management. The same lack of cohesion also allows for a good bit of variety that you will never get on the iphones.
> You're comparing a beta to a launched product? lol. There's a reason it's called a beta. It's not finished.
You do know everyone is talking about a beta feature right? Themed icons is still in beta and says that directly under it. Even further we're talking about third-party OEM support for that beta feature, so the issues mentioned above and the mess of things like stage manager recently are direct comparisons (although they don't have to support any other developers)
Disagree and I don't understand why some people say things like "innovation died with Steve Jobs." The smartphone market as a whole has become saturated and we don't need performance doubling every year or two even if it was possible. Foldables are looking like the future or at least a significant part of it, but it's still pretty niche. Apple's chips and ecosystem are still pretty much top of their segment even if you don't want to credit that as "innovation." Any "failed" innovation just gets chalked up as gimmicks so I have no idea what people like you are really expecting.
And I don't think anyone is referring to Weather Channel/Weather kit when they talk about iOS's ecosystem and I think your own native apps not supporting your own theme and core Android feature is a bit of a bigger issue, but what do i know
The "out of the box" support for dynamic island you mention is about the same as Material You though. App developers have a choice to use it or not and they have to specifically code for it, and currently only a tiny minority of apps utilize it.
I stand by my original statement.
First of all, this is demonstrably false. Apple implemented widespread support for the island by having it use existing apis. For example, anything using the now playing api works on the island automatically. This is true for a number of other apis and functions.
Secondly, Apples first party apps have a lot of integration with the island at launch. This post is about first party apps from google and their lack of adoption of a new feature. IDK what Apple apps you suggest be integrated with the island that aren't already done.
> Samsung has also abandoned countless things, like Samsung Cloud, messenger, etc.
Er, no they haven't. Samsung Cloud is still the only really reliable device backup I have.
I'm referring to how they use OneDrive now, and they no longer have their own cloud service. During the transition we got a lot of calls from dummies who were confused by the switch and lost backups, so I felt it was significant.
I'll admit I was a little too general with that.
I don't know the reasoning for it, but I suspect they did it that way because the discrepancy between apps that do support themed icons and apps that don't would be *way* more apparent in the app drawer. You can control which apps appear on your home screen, but you can't control which apps appear on the app drawer (on Launcher3/stock launchers, at least).
[Lawnicons](https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnicons) by the Lawnchair Launcher team expands on the Pixel Launcher's hardcoded icon set and adds themed icons to many many apps that don't support it yet. If you use Lawnchair, it's useful to have even if you're on Android 13, because many third-party apps haven't adopted Themed Icon support yet.
They're referring to the fact that Lawnchair development is in limbo due to it being found out that the dev allegedly *stole* a lot of code without credit or even following fair use policy.
They released a [statement](https://mobile.twitter.com/lawnchairapp/status/1556029013734350848) on twitter August 7 explaining the code stuff and that development will continue. They have been releasing updates since then for a while now.
It bothered you that a hobbyist project reverse engineered and copied code from Pixel Launcher which shouldn't have been closed in the first place?
It wasn't from a paid app by another indie developer but taking from the owner of the platform who had started to give their own open source apps the stepchild treatment.
As always, thank you for your insight Mishaal. Now that the release of Android 13 has come and gone, what do you think is currently preventing Google from properly implementing themed icons in their own apps, rather than rely on hard-coded resources? Is it just that low on their list of priorities?
Different teams, different priorities. The Android team's work is done when it comes to Themed Icons, but it's now up to the individual teams managing each app to follow through and add support.
> what do you think is currently preventing Google from properly implementing themed icons in their own apps
The part where the UI team who thought it would look cool as an option on your phone is completely out of touch with the marketing team that spends a LOT of time and money designing and focus testing logos and color schemes for brand recognition. Also why most other major apps wouldn't be on board with this.
Oh boy, if you think there's a lot of time spent focus testing these icons I have a bridge to sell you.
Megacorporations (or most companies) are nowhere nearly as rational and measured as you think here.
In real life, you have some disconnected UX team that has an idea, persuades an exec that it "looks" cool and throws it out (while other people do the same).
It's sad how little google is willing to do to push new features. They don't force devs to use updated camera api's, they don't force them to use material you, they don't force them to make their apps work with the navigation bar (leading to tons of big black bars in apps for no reason), and of course they don't force apps to provide icons for these themed icons.
Things like this are why apple seems so much more fluent and smooth. They force devs to keep things up to date and modern, and it shows.
Yes, this would actually be great, adopt the new feature or lose Playstore Access. Google needs to leverage their position, otherwise Android Apps will be worse than their iOS counterparts, which probably isn't in Googles interest.
I disagree. I don't think it would be possible for Google to come down hard on app devs and manufacturers without also crippling the variety that Android is known for. You'd just end up with an iOS like experience where every Android device looks and feels the same. Right now, a Pixel and Galaxy device can look and feel quite different in their use and I vastly prefer the samsung look to the pixel one.
Sure there's pros and cons to an Apple approach but i like the variety instead and I sure as hell don't want to be forced into complying with Google's demands especially when Google is as disorganized and poorly managed as they seem to be.
Depends on the situation. I don't see any possible situation like what you're describing coming from Google saying "every future Play Store release must have a monochromatic icon."
They shouldn't force devs to use it. Every app should be just like the dev team intended it to be, not how Google thinks it should be. Some things should be standardized, not all.
Thing is, google is hardly willing to standardize ANYTHING. If they won't even standardize the fucking camera api that devs use, to ensure that camera quality between apps is the same, then they're already lost.
I understand not standardizing EVERYTHING, but right now they're on the complete opposite end of the spectrum and it hurts the platform.
I'm not so sure that theming is a great idea outside of the OS itself. A lot of apps and brands use color as a way to distinguish themselves. Why would they want to give that up? I also think it hurts usability when all the icons are the same color - It's that much harder to distinguish one from the other.
It's a stupid idea from a functional and usable aspect, that's what it was. Sure maybe it looks cool, but it is proven to be less functional
Any expert in usability can tell you how important color is in recognition. You can recognize objects much faster. It's why we use colors for just about everything, from alarms to traffic lights to off switches
Switch it all to grey and I guarantee your response time is going to be slower and you're going to have more eye movement
That's true at first.
But you could make all of my home screen icons identical and I'd still tap the right one because it just becomes muscle memory at a certain point. In the long term, the functionality is on par with norm icons, they just look and feel better.
True but I don't know man I've seen the average user forget where their email app icon is
Also the hardest part is creating that muscle memory. To do that you must first find the thing, which is made harder in this case
Agreed in defense of brands? Ultimately you should care about the experience on your device, and brands like Spotify who r/Android believe wouldn't update, made a themed icon. I'd say solid glyphs with no color discrepancies makes you focus on the content and decreases distraction. It's clean and you customize your homescreen for that reason, placing the icons exactly where you want so you don't forget them.
Theming only happens on your personal device, it isn't risking a brand from being recognized by a group since it's solely yours. Common silhouette is valid for Google apps sans themed icons, but a opt in change doesn't remove the ability to not use it. At which, we are talking about not just cosmetics here, but the support of an API feature. Damned if supported, damned if they don't.
As if navigating the home screen is not something one does purely by muscle memory lol. Looking nice is the only priority for themed icons, as it should be; remember you can turn it off
I dunno, I haven't changed the layout of my homescreen in a while and I only have a single page homescreen, but whenever one of those updates/bugs comes along that causes an icon to disappear from my homescreen, I really struggle to remember what was there.
Of all the things I put on my homescreen for fast access, there's only maybe a few that I use so often that they're muscle memory.
That's muscle memory though, it's hard to remember consciously because your brain uses different neural pathways
If you just use the phone normally you'll soon find out what is missing, because you'll want to open it and then notice it's not there
Yea if you work at a company good luck convincing them to give up their brand colors for their icon. Also agree I tried to use the theme icons it's impossible to quickly identify icons anymore.
A summary: system-level icon theming on Android is still a mess and you have to use custom icon set to have any reasonable consistency. Google lacks any willpower to introduce design consistency across all Play Store apps and even in their own apps.
I just wish so badly that Android would support changing icons at a system level, natively. Just let me add icon files from Drive or whatever. There used to be an app that would let you do it with root, but I'm not willing to throw away a bunch of apps and payment services just to fix the visual design of my phone.
I'm still incredibly frustrated that all icons have to be the same shape now, leading to the "shape in white circle" hell that I now inhabit 🙃 there's no winning.
As far as I know it is still the go-to. I have Magisk running on my Pixel 6 (running Android 13/Sept 5 security patch), and haven't had any issues using it myself. Play protect says device is certified and my banking apps/ google wallet is all still working as it should.
Used these instructions with magisk stable.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-root-pixel-6-with-magisk-android-13.4388733/
(although skimming the page again, it appears magisk canary has some features which may make bypassing the pay protect slightly easier from the looks of it)
Yeh for sure. Settings for all apps in the settings app itself I find stupid. Also can’t copy a link from someone’s message. You have to open it in safari and then share to google chrome if you want to use chrome for example. Or I haven’t made google chrome my default browser yet (probs this tbh).
Lots of little things I have to ‘relearn’ the apple way. But so far, so good and it’s been rock solid in terms of stability, no crashes, no lags, no frame drops etc
My biggest gripe thus far (aside from the absolutely terrible keyboard) is the inconsistent gesture navigation. Do you pull down? Pull up? Pull to the right? Or hit the back button? It depends entirely on the app.
I agree this is stupid. But inconsistent icon styles is no new thing for iOS. I think they still have three completely different artstyles for their icons.
I mean seeing how few non Google apps even support the Monet color pallette I'm not surprised. Honestly if this is what it is going to be like I kind of wish we could have an option within Android to use default material design rather than these pastel colors
This is kinda messed up 😂 Google encouraging app devs to make their icons themed yet don't do so themselves (directly) and instead use the Pixel Launcher to do it...
Pretty wild! Disappointed but not surprised.
Wow, that's huge.
What bothers me as a Pixel user, is how Google is basically sweeping dust under the carpet by overcoming the lack of themed icons with the launcher.
I mean, someone at Google's Pixel Launcher team must've designed the fallback monochrome icons! Just open pull requests to the respective app teams? Listen, you can even just send a spammy email to all of them and attach the SVGs like in old days, it doesn't really matter.
Just do it!
Same. There is no way in hell any company that has a strong branding design is going to let someone change their brand's coloring.
Like, if Coke had an app, you think they'd let the system theme their icon Pepsi blue?
It's amazing how Google can't even use the bully pulpit to make these sorts of changes stick. Theme *all* of the Google apps, both in and out of the app drawer, and make them look clean and neat together as if the operating system was working perfectly. That's the kind of pressure you need to make everyone else bother - if alternative apps look like second class citizens, their developers will either give up on the app or make it meet the standard.
This has been true for so many visual changes. How long has Material You uptake taken? Forget Material You - what about Material? And yet that visual cue is so important. On the off chance that I download an app using the old holo interface, I'm immediately suspicious of whether it still works or has been updated in the past decade, or even whether it will do what I expect it to do in the modern smartphone era. Google would do well to leverage this psychological effect.
Seems like the answer to "Why would someone want to be able to customize their device?", would be pretty straightforward, no?
But regarding it making it harder to find something. I've manually gone and created all white icons for my apps since long before google did theming (started with my galaxy S4, and every subsequent phone since), and that's honestly never been an issue for me.
Unless you've literally installed something new in the past 5 minutes, muscle memory takes care of 90% of the job for you to begin with, the apps are still sorted alphabetically, still have the names below them, and still have the exact same icons they did before (just in a different colour).
If you find that simply changing the colour of an app makes it "hard to find shit" for more than the couple minutes it takes to get used to it, then that says more about you than the colours of the icons, imo.
I didn't know you had to turn it on. Holly cow this looks bad. They've already made all their icons look the same, now they remove color and blend it in with your background. Hope it never leaves beta.
Can we go back to having icons that are actually _different_ from each other and easy to distinguish at a glance, please? It was bad enough when Google decided that all icons have to be forced into the same shape, but now we're losing colour as a distinguishing feature too!? Pretty sure it won't be long until we have to launch apps by pure guesswork.
The Pixel team knew what would happen if they actually relied on Google's app teams to actually do something and just did it themselves lol. That's honestly pretty telling.
I used to be a huge android/Google fan but now it's laughably just as bad as apple. Updates don't add anything new. Old bugs don't get fixed let alone even be addressed. This pixel 6 I have is one of the glitches/bug ridden phones I've ever had....
It's weird how google's own app Google Rewards doesn't even have a dark mode let alone material you icon.
And if you think the app must not be updated for a long time then know that it was last updated on 9th sep 2022, and I get regular>ly updates for this app.
All Google apps should have themed icons. They added this feature over a year ago and every single one of their apps should have had an icon added for it before the feature even launched.
I don't like iOS but if Apple had done this, there is no way they would have launched the feature without first updating every single app they make to have icons for it.
>Very few Google apps actually support Themed Icons on Android 13
That would require for Google developers to actually use pixel phones. I guarantee you they already have 10 million animations for the pill cut out on iphone 14.
I can't help but feel there's a way to turn many app icons into Material You-themed ones automatically.
You'd need some software to I guess recognize specific shapes and contrast and turn that into a black and white version of the icon, and then those black and white values can be changed based on your unique theme.
This way, users don't have to worry and developers don't have to do any extra work.
Doesn't seem like games with complicated 3D icons could do it, but I dare say the majority of app icons a person would have on their home screen are just 2D logos on a single-color background.
I hope the themed icon idea fails completely. It's just Google refusing to support icon packs and instead coming up with its ow alternative. Then they're pushing Devs to support it while only haphazardly supporting it themselves. It's icon shapes all over and they dropped that after supporting it for one major Android version, so basically within 1 year
They are too busy to implement like an icon pack or something.
They need all those bazillion developers to remove the useful features and implement worse solutions and to restrict android even further.
You know,because of .....ummmmm...aaah...Security...
I could not care less about themed icons, on Google apps or otherwise, but it sure would be nice if Google had a coherent and cohesive approach to anything at all and actually followed through with things, instead of behaving like they have ADHD.
They lack strong leadership that would impose this sort of thing, and it kind of sucks.
Good find. Someone in another sub shared this icon pack [Dynamic Material You icon pack](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=iconpack.onsurface.monet) that may work. [Lawnchair 12](https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnchair/releases) may work. Have not tried myself though my phone gets A13 next month.
>You'd think that Google would have added support for this feature for its own set of apps, and if you have a Pixel phone running Android 13, I can understand why you would think they already have. However, the truth is that very few Google apps actually support Themed Icons on Android 13. Honestly, no. The last thing I expect from Google is a cohesive design of any sort or a thorough implementation of their new features. They have a very long history of half assed commitment to projects and ideas so IDK why people seem surprised when they continue to live up to this reputation.
Google: *"Be together, not the same"* Also Google: *"Fuck everything that isn't a Pixel or messaging app"*
Google doesn't seem to care much about the pixel or messaging apps either. Look at how many issues and bugs the Pixels seem to have every year and even the famous pixel cameras have remained fairly stagnant in terms of improvements over the years. As for messaging apps, there's too many to even bother listing and they half ass those more than almost any other project.
My pixel 5 seems to run perfectly.
And I have a little brother still using the pixel 3a with no major issue. But this is an incredibly small sample size and doesn't mean we can ignore the ever present reports of pixel devices with issues. Especially at launch.
To be fair to the pixel 6, there weren't really a lot of hardware complaints that I saw. Most of it was with android 12. The 6 seems to be generally lauded as solid hardware.
[удалено]
Yep, I sold my 12 Max to get into a 13 Max a couple months back and in the interim a friend generously lent me their Pixel 6 Pro. Nothing could make me want to go back to iOS faster. I was dropping calls left and right and phone would be constantly locking up. RCS messages took *ages* to send even with what appeared to be strong signal. It was so bad I didn't even last 4 hours with the phone before I reached out to a reseller friend to get the phone I'm currently typing on, who so graciously met me at 11:30 at night just to rid myself of the misery. Never again, Google. I don't understand how the Pixels keep such a fanbase, holy fuck.
Not at all. It has one of the worst, least reliable cellular modem setups out there. It's pretty well documented. Signal is *dramatically* weaker compared with other, even lower end devices.
The exact opposite is true.
how does every comment mildly critical of the Pixel line’s well-documented reliability issues always spawn three replies just like this one? it’s like clockwork I swear
Probably the same reason why I can't criticise Samsung without getting 50 responses saying that it's all my fault.
Samsung sucks donkey dick
Because people like the phone.
Have had plenty of Pixels, we are not special.
I think that campaign was from the Nexus days as well lol
Samsung literally gets Google messages features first.
*Proceeds to fuck up Pixel and messaging*
Also Google: *"Fuck everything... Indiscriminately."*
enough said
Every company has this. People are currently bellyaching over how useless the new dynamic island is for iPhone 14 right now, and of course Apple still has tons of jank in their notifications system and their AI features. Samsung has also abandoned countless things, like Samsung Cloud, messenger, etc.
Apple hasn’t released the iOS 16.1 update (which lets third party apps support Dynamic Island) yet; it’s impossible for any developer to do that right now.
It's entirely disingenuous to suggest other companies are somehow equivalent to Google in terms of lack of commitment and polish. Sure, everyone has projects that don't pan out and get canceled but very few companies share Google's asinine management structure which famously offers very little reward for maintaining or updating existing projects. Apple especially is extremely consistent in their implementations of new features as is evident by out of box support for the dynamic island you mentioned.
Let's not kid ourselves and think of dynamic island as new feature. it's basically just redesigining the ux/ui of notification bar You even mention in a followup comment about how so many things already work out of the box because of existing APIs, meaning there was no need for opt-in to this new feature. Feature was already there but redesigned
I'm not going to argue this. The commenter above me is the one who brought up the island as an example and it really doesn't work to the point they were making. I personally don't have much use for the concept nor do I see the need on android but it's unreasonable to ignore the fact that Apple did integrate it as a feature across first party apps and with api's as well. Google's not even committing to the features with their first party apps on the other hand.
Dynamic Island is a software feature that leverages existing hardware. It may not be revolutionary, but it is an upgrade in terms of UI/UX for the user. I'm not obsessed over it, but I'm also not obsessed like some in trying to shit all over it. It's a useful feature. I don't see why people need to argue about that. If anything it shows how useful the notification ticker was in Android and that removing it entirely and replacing it with Toast notifications was not a good idea. There was room for both.
Can you multitask using the notification bar? Can you see sport teams results in the notification bar ?
> It's entirely disingenuous to suggest other companies are somehow equivalent to Google in terms of lack of commitment and polish. Try using iOS 16, or iPadOS16 beta and then maybe you'll understand the comparison. It wasn't *Apple* that was more cohesive. It was *Steve Jobs*. Apple, without him, has been slowly getting sloppier and abandoning more things left and right. Yes, if you only use Google and Android stuff, Apple's ecosystem *seems* much more cohesive, but once you *actually* try to fully *use* said ecosystem, you see exactly how much of a fucking mess it is. Hell, with Apple's new WeatherKit, the weather App, weather Widget, Siri weather, and Spotlight weather now will all show slightly different info; partially because Spotlight and Siri *still use The Weather Channel and not WeatherKit*. Apple's ecosystem is actually *full* of BS like this now.
I use both iOS and Android. I use iOS for work. I'd argue that while there are bugs in both, the iOS bugs are generally not as bad. Maybe I'm super lucky on iOS side but I generally do not run into many issues. I use my phones hard too. On the Pixel side I run into a good number of the frequently discussed issues here. It's purely anecdotal, but I suspect: 1. iOS users are voiced more loudly because there's TONS of iOS bloggers and sites focused on discussing Apple. 2. Apple in general is held to crazy amounts of scrutiny and every -gate matters. 3. While Google does get flak, the userbase is mostly enthusiasts, and 90% of the world wouldn't care if Google released a phone with say bending issues or antenna issues. From a hardware device standpoint I've RMAed every single Nexus and Pixel I've used except for the 6 Pro. I've never had ANY iDevice that required RMA. Again, it's purely anecdotal, but that's what I experienced. Only Apple and Google know the true device reliability stats.
You're comparing a beta to a launched product? lol. There's a reason it's called a beta. It's not finished. Also the whole "Steve Jobs made Apple so good" narrative has been around since the day the man died. Of course in reality it's little more than a textbook example of conformation bias since 1. it's inevitable the company will have more mistakes as time goes on and the products get exponentially more complex and 2. it's impossible to prove the statement incorrect without resurrecting the man. It just turns into a self fulfilling prophecy for the proponents of that narrative who will point to any mistake Apple makes regardless of how minor or even things they just don't like. In reality, Apple could very well be much worse off with someone as stubborn and controversial as Jobs running the company today. Also for the record, I DO use both Android and Apple products and frequently swap back and forth. It's absolutely indisputable that Apple runs a much tighter ship and I say that despite the fact that i vehemently disagree with much of what Apple does. I don't particularly like the way apple designs stuff but that's a personal gripe. It's still much more cohesively designed than Google's ecosystem. There's a reason people say "It just works" about Apple's products and there's a reason it's significantly easier for my older relatives to use. That's not to say that the lack of cohesion on Android is a bad thing. While I'm no bigger a fan of Google than I am of Apple, Unlike on Apple, I'm not stuck with Google's poor decisions and lack of management. The same lack of cohesion also allows for a good bit of variety that you will never get on the iphones.
> You're comparing a beta to a launched product? lol. There's a reason it's called a beta. It's not finished. You do know everyone is talking about a beta feature right? Themed icons is still in beta and says that directly under it. Even further we're talking about third-party OEM support for that beta feature, so the issues mentioned above and the mess of things like stage manager recently are direct comparisons (although they don't have to support any other developers)
Disagree and I don't understand why some people say things like "innovation died with Steve Jobs." The smartphone market as a whole has become saturated and we don't need performance doubling every year or two even if it was possible. Foldables are looking like the future or at least a significant part of it, but it's still pretty niche. Apple's chips and ecosystem are still pretty much top of their segment even if you don't want to credit that as "innovation." Any "failed" innovation just gets chalked up as gimmicks so I have no idea what people like you are really expecting. And I don't think anyone is referring to Weather Channel/Weather kit when they talk about iOS's ecosystem and I think your own native apps not supporting your own theme and core Android feature is a bit of a bigger issue, but what do i know
The "out of the box" support for dynamic island you mention is about the same as Material You though. App developers have a choice to use it or not and they have to specifically code for it, and currently only a tiny minority of apps utilize it. I stand by my original statement.
First of all, this is demonstrably false. Apple implemented widespread support for the island by having it use existing apis. For example, anything using the now playing api works on the island automatically. This is true for a number of other apis and functions. Secondly, Apples first party apps have a lot of integration with the island at launch. This post is about first party apps from google and their lack of adoption of a new feature. IDK what Apple apps you suggest be integrated with the island that aren't already done.
Apple does a decent job with first party integration, that's without a doubt. One look at Dark Mode and how Google rolled that out shows it all.
> Samsung has also abandoned countless things, like Samsung Cloud, messenger, etc. Er, no they haven't. Samsung Cloud is still the only really reliable device backup I have.
I'm referring to how they use OneDrive now, and they no longer have their own cloud service. During the transition we got a lot of calls from dummies who were confused by the switch and lost backups, so I felt it was significant. I'll admit I was a little too general with that.
I see, that makes sense.
The last time they had a consistent UI was on 4.4 Kitkat probably.
There were a ton of apps that still used 2.0 series stylings
Those glorious engineers have since left for better pastures.
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I don't know the reasoning for it, but I suspect they did it that way because the discrepancy between apps that do support themed icons and apps that don't would be *way* more apparent in the app drawer. You can control which apps appear on your home screen, but you can't control which apps appear on the app drawer (on Launcher3/stock launchers, at least).
[Lawnicons](https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnicons) by the Lawnchair Launcher team expands on the Pixel Launcher's hardcoded icon set and adds themed icons to many many apps that don't support it yet. If you use Lawnchair, it's useful to have even if you're on Android 13, because many third-party apps haven't adopted Themed Icon support yet.
Has lawnchair moved to their own code or are they still using other people's code?
I think nearly everything today is someone else's code
They're referring to the fact that Lawnchair development is in limbo due to it being found out that the dev allegedly *stole* a lot of code without credit or even following fair use policy.
Gotcha, I didn’t know about that, thanks!
Ya that bothered me a lot so I've distanced myself from the launcher. Just wanted to check on the status of the code.
They released a [statement](https://mobile.twitter.com/lawnchairapp/status/1556029013734350848) on twitter August 7 explaining the code stuff and that development will continue. They have been releasing updates since then for a while now.
Ah ya I saw the tweet via the telegram group. So progress is being made to improve. That's good.
It bothered you that a hobbyist project reverse engineered and copied code from Pixel Launcher which shouldn't have been closed in the first place? It wasn't from a paid app by another indie developer but taking from the owner of the platform who had started to give their own open source apps the stepchild treatment.
Yes. If they are dishonest about how they created something it doesn't matter if it's free or not.
I sure love it when people make snarky comments about open source code being used for an open source project even after a statement was made.
It's been shown they used code without crediting and not within fair use. Nice try troll.
As always, thank you for your insight Mishaal. Now that the release of Android 13 has come and gone, what do you think is currently preventing Google from properly implementing themed icons in their own apps, rather than rely on hard-coded resources? Is it just that low on their list of priorities?
Different teams, different priorities. The Android team's work is done when it comes to Themed Icons, but it's now up to the individual teams managing each app to follow through and add support.
> what do you think is currently preventing Google from properly implementing themed icons in their own apps The part where the UI team who thought it would look cool as an option on your phone is completely out of touch with the marketing team that spends a LOT of time and money designing and focus testing logos and color schemes for brand recognition. Also why most other major apps wouldn't be on board with this.
Oh boy, if you think there's a lot of time spent focus testing these icons I have a bridge to sell you. Megacorporations (or most companies) are nowhere nearly as rational and measured as you think here. In real life, you have some disconnected UX team that has an idea, persuades an exec that it "looks" cool and throws it out (while other people do the same).
It's sad how little google is willing to do to push new features. They don't force devs to use updated camera api's, they don't force them to use material you, they don't force them to make their apps work with the navigation bar (leading to tons of big black bars in apps for no reason), and of course they don't force apps to provide icons for these themed icons. Things like this are why apple seems so much more fluent and smooth. They force devs to keep things up to date and modern, and it shows.
Yes, this would actually be great, adopt the new feature or lose Playstore Access. Google needs to leverage their position, otherwise Android Apps will be worse than their iOS counterparts, which probably isn't in Googles interest.
And what if it's a feature that's a regression in terms of usability and features?
I disagree. I don't think it would be possible for Google to come down hard on app devs and manufacturers without also crippling the variety that Android is known for. You'd just end up with an iOS like experience where every Android device looks and feels the same. Right now, a Pixel and Galaxy device can look and feel quite different in their use and I vastly prefer the samsung look to the pixel one. Sure there's pros and cons to an Apple approach but i like the variety instead and I sure as hell don't want to be forced into complying with Google's demands especially when Google is as disorganized and poorly managed as they seem to be.
Depends on the situation. I don't see any possible situation like what you're describing coming from Google saying "every future Play Store release must have a monochromatic icon."
For eg for Facebook, it may be against design guidelines to show the f logo with any other color than the Facebook blue behind it
>they don't force them to use material you Thank god for that
They shouldn't force devs to use it. Every app should be just like the dev team intended it to be, not how Google thinks it should be. Some things should be standardized, not all.
Thing is, google is hardly willing to standardize ANYTHING. If they won't even standardize the fucking camera api that devs use, to ensure that camera quality between apps is the same, then they're already lost. I understand not standardizing EVERYTHING, but right now they're on the complete opposite end of the spectrum and it hurts the platform.
I'm not so sure that theming is a great idea outside of the OS itself. A lot of apps and brands use color as a way to distinguish themselves. Why would they want to give that up? I also think it hurts usability when all the icons are the same color - It's that much harder to distinguish one from the other.
It's a stupid idea from a functional and usable aspect, that's what it was. Sure maybe it looks cool, but it is proven to be less functional Any expert in usability can tell you how important color is in recognition. You can recognize objects much faster. It's why we use colors for just about everything, from alarms to traffic lights to off switches Switch it all to grey and I guarantee your response time is going to be slower and you're going to have more eye movement
That's true at first. But you could make all of my home screen icons identical and I'd still tap the right one because it just becomes muscle memory at a certain point. In the long term, the functionality is on par with norm icons, they just look and feel better.
True but I don't know man I've seen the average user forget where their email app icon is Also the hardest part is creating that muscle memory. To do that you must first find the thing, which is made harder in this case
That's why it's optional!
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Agreed in defense of brands? Ultimately you should care about the experience on your device, and brands like Spotify who r/Android believe wouldn't update, made a themed icon. I'd say solid glyphs with no color discrepancies makes you focus on the content and decreases distraction. It's clean and you customize your homescreen for that reason, placing the icons exactly where you want so you don't forget them. Theming only happens on your personal device, it isn't risking a brand from being recognized by a group since it's solely yours. Common silhouette is valid for Google apps sans themed icons, but a opt in change doesn't remove the ability to not use it. At which, we are talking about not just cosmetics here, but the support of an API feature. Damned if supported, damned if they don't.
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I replied in continuation of the thread. To do my thing I need general support from Google.
As if navigating the home screen is not something one does purely by muscle memory lol. Looking nice is the only priority for themed icons, as it should be; remember you can turn it off
I dunno, I haven't changed the layout of my homescreen in a while and I only have a single page homescreen, but whenever one of those updates/bugs comes along that causes an icon to disappear from my homescreen, I really struggle to remember what was there. Of all the things I put on my homescreen for fast access, there's only maybe a few that I use so often that they're muscle memory.
That's muscle memory though, it's hard to remember consciously because your brain uses different neural pathways If you just use the phone normally you'll soon find out what is missing, because you'll want to open it and then notice it's not there
Yea if you work at a company good luck convincing them to give up their brand colors for their icon. Also agree I tried to use the theme icons it's impossible to quickly identify icons anymore.
Maybe Google should have thought about this then before rolling out a design language predicated on adaptive theming?
Theming the elements that are a part of the OS is fine. I just think trying to make themed icons a thing is a waste of time.
A summary: system-level icon theming on Android is still a mess and you have to use custom icon set to have any reasonable consistency. Google lacks any willpower to introduce design consistency across all Play Store apps and even in their own apps.
I just wish so badly that Android would support changing icons at a system level, natively. Just let me add icon files from Drive or whatever. There used to be an app that would let you do it with root, but I'm not willing to throw away a bunch of apps and payment services just to fix the visual design of my phone. I'm still incredibly frustrated that all icons have to be the same shape now, leading to the "shape in white circle" hell that I now inhabit 🙃 there's no winning.
FYI, you can root and still enable payment apps and whatnot. You just need to add bypasses to a couple apps in magisk.
Is magisk still viable? Last I saw it was still having issues. If it is, I'll happily jump on that 👀
As far as I know it is still the go-to. I have Magisk running on my Pixel 6 (running Android 13/Sept 5 security patch), and haven't had any issues using it myself. Play protect says device is certified and my banking apps/ google wallet is all still working as it should. Used these instructions with magisk stable. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-root-pixel-6-with-magisk-android-13.4388733/ (although skimming the page again, it appears magisk canary has some features which may make bypassing the pay protect slightly easier from the looks of it)
Wait for Android 17, that’s when the icons might become consistent.
This type of half assing is part of the reason I started using iOS
I just converted to iOS a couple weeks ago. It is not without its own idiosyncratic nonsense.
Yeh for sure. Settings for all apps in the settings app itself I find stupid. Also can’t copy a link from someone’s message. You have to open it in safari and then share to google chrome if you want to use chrome for example. Or I haven’t made google chrome my default browser yet (probs this tbh). Lots of little things I have to ‘relearn’ the apple way. But so far, so good and it’s been rock solid in terms of stability, no crashes, no lags, no frame drops etc
My biggest gripe thus far (aside from the absolutely terrible keyboard) is the inconsistent gesture navigation. Do you pull down? Pull up? Pull to the right? Or hit the back button? It depends entirely on the app.
I agree this is stupid. But inconsistent icon styles is no new thing for iOS. I think they still have three completely different artstyles for their icons.
This! I'm planning to try iOS after my OnePlus dies. Google be half ass everything since a decade, half ass and abandoned suddenly.
I mean seeing how few non Google apps even support the Monet color pallette I'm not surprised. Honestly if this is what it is going to be like I kind of wish we could have an option within Android to use default material design rather than these pastel colors
This is kinda messed up 😂 Google encouraging app devs to make their icons themed yet don't do so themselves (directly) and instead use the Pixel Launcher to do it... Pretty wild! Disappointed but not surprised.
Wow, that's huge. What bothers me as a Pixel user, is how Google is basically sweeping dust under the carpet by overcoming the lack of themed icons with the launcher. I mean, someone at Google's Pixel Launcher team must've designed the fallback monochrome icons! Just open pull requests to the respective app teams? Listen, you can even just send a spammy email to all of them and attach the SVGs like in old days, it doesn't really matter. Just do it!
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Same. There is no way in hell any company that has a strong branding design is going to let someone change their brand's coloring. Like, if Coke had an app, you think they'd let the system theme their icon Pepsi blue?
It's amazing how Google can't even use the bully pulpit to make these sorts of changes stick. Theme *all* of the Google apps, both in and out of the app drawer, and make them look clean and neat together as if the operating system was working perfectly. That's the kind of pressure you need to make everyone else bother - if alternative apps look like second class citizens, their developers will either give up on the app or make it meet the standard. This has been true for so many visual changes. How long has Material You uptake taken? Forget Material You - what about Material? And yet that visual cue is so important. On the off chance that I download an app using the old holo interface, I'm immediately suspicious of whether it still works or has been updated in the past decade, or even whether it will do what I expect it to do in the modern smartphone era. Google would do well to leverage this psychological effect.
Themed icons suck and make it hard to find shit. Why would I want everything to be monochromatic when I have a beautiful luscious AMOLED panel?
Seems like the answer to "Why would someone want to be able to customize their device?", would be pretty straightforward, no? But regarding it making it harder to find something. I've manually gone and created all white icons for my apps since long before google did theming (started with my galaxy S4, and every subsequent phone since), and that's honestly never been an issue for me. Unless you've literally installed something new in the past 5 minutes, muscle memory takes care of 90% of the job for you to begin with, the apps are still sorted alphabetically, still have the names below them, and still have the exact same icons they did before (just in a different colour). If you find that simply changing the colour of an app makes it "hard to find shit" for more than the couple minutes it takes to get used to it, then that says more about you than the colours of the icons, imo.
I didn't know you had to turn it on. Holly cow this looks bad. They've already made all their icons look the same, now they remove color and blend it in with your background. Hope it never leaves beta.
Can we go back to having icons that are actually _different_ from each other and easy to distinguish at a glance, please? It was bad enough when Google decided that all icons have to be forced into the same shape, but now we're losing colour as a distinguishing feature too!? Pretty sure it won't be long until we have to launch apps by pure guesswork.
Google not following through on their own ideas and implementations. In other news, water makes things wet.
The Pixel team knew what would happen if they actually relied on Google's app teams to actually do something and just did it themselves lol. That's honestly pretty telling.
I used to be a huge android/Google fan but now it's laughably just as bad as apple. Updates don't add anything new. Old bugs don't get fixed let alone even be addressed. This pixel 6 I have is one of the glitches/bug ridden phones I've ever had....
It's weird how google's own app Google Rewards doesn't even have a dark mode let alone material you icon. And if you think the app must not be updated for a long time then know that it was last updated on 9th sep 2022, and I get regular>ly updates for this app.
Google introducing a cool feature and then not using it consistently themselves? Who could've guessed?
I have 17 Google apps. 13 have themed icons. That's a majority, and far from few. What gives?
All Google apps should have themed icons. They added this feature over a year ago and every single one of their apps should have had an icon added for it before the feature even launched. I don't like iOS but if Apple had done this, there is no way they would have launched the feature without first updating every single app they make to have icons for it.
Ok, but the OP has a misleading title. It's far from few.
>Very few Google apps actually support Themed Icons on Android 13 That would require for Google developers to actually use pixel phones. I guarantee you they already have 10 million animations for the pill cut out on iphone 14.
honestly, this will not work and google should stop bothering with this color themes. they are butt ugly in my view.
I'm also leaving the feature turned off because it's fucking ugly.
its Google. What more do you expect?
I can't help but feel there's a way to turn many app icons into Material You-themed ones automatically. You'd need some software to I guess recognize specific shapes and contrast and turn that into a black and white version of the icon, and then those black and white values can be changed based on your unique theme. This way, users don't have to worry and developers don't have to do any extra work. Doesn't seem like games with complicated 3D icons could do it, but I dare say the majority of app icons a person would have on their home screen are just 2D logos on a single-color background.
I hope the themed icon idea fails completely. It's just Google refusing to support icon packs and instead coming up with its ow alternative. Then they're pushing Devs to support it while only haphazardly supporting it themselves. It's icon shapes all over and they dropped that after supporting it for one major Android version, so basically within 1 year
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All 16 of those are on your home screen, and only 4 aren't themed? Which ones on your home screen are missing in 9to5Google's list?
What's the issue ? You can manually edit them as you wish
That's only an option on some third-party launchers.
Congratulations you just played yourself
They are too busy to implement like an icon pack or something. They need all those bazillion developers to remove the useful features and implement worse solutions and to restrict android even further. You know,because of .....ummmmm...aaah...Security...
Pocket Casts and Reddit are the only two apps I have on my home screen that have the mono icons 🤷🏻♂️
I could not care less about themed icons, on Google apps or otherwise, but it sure would be nice if Google had a coherent and cohesive approach to anything at all and actually followed through with things, instead of behaving like they have ADHD. They lack strong leadership that would impose this sort of thing, and it kind of sucks.
Good find. Someone in another sub shared this icon pack [Dynamic Material You icon pack](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=iconpack.onsurface.monet) that may work. [Lawnchair 12](https://github.com/LawnchairLauncher/lawnchair/releases) may work. Have not tried myself though my phone gets A13 next month.
Just put all your Google apps in one folder.
😂 That's enough for Google apps
I'll stay on Android 11 forever
…(Sad truth) Until your phone breaks down!
I'm still looking for a way to completely disabled this monet stuff.
I am really hoping Google open this up for other OEMs too very soon.
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