Android now has a way to make all apps support icon color theming

You may have thought today was going to be all about the Pixel 10 and Google’s latest hardware, but that has only been the start of things. No sooner did Google wrap things up with Jimmy Fallon and the Jonas Brothers than we got our first whiff of Android 16 QPR2 incoming, as Google released its initial beta to Pixel testers.

Right now we’re looking through all the QPR2 Beta 1 changes on our phones to spot some of the highlights, and one we’ve already taken for a spin lets you force themed icon colors on apps that don’t natively support them.

The problem there is that Android’s theming system only operates with app icons where the developer has provided a monochrome version of the icon for Android to work with. At least, that’s how it’s behaved so far, which sucked if you had a bunch of unsupported icons on your home screen messing up its whole vibe.

With QPR2 Beta 1, Google now lets Android automatically transform icons to monochrome — and then apply the appropriate palette theming. And as you can see in these examples from scuttlefield and A_Button117, it already works kind of great:

You might not immediately see this working with apps already present on your device, but installing an app fresh out of the Play Store demonstrated the effect perfectly in our testing.

With QPR2, Google is also changing up how you control these settings for app icons, eliminating the existing toggle for themed icon colors and now presenting you with a screen of options:

While it’s not yet functional in this release, the new “Create” button over on the right there sure feels like it might be related to the work we’ve already spotted on a system for AI-generated icon styles. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to play with that in action soon, but it looks like that’s going to mean waiting for a future Android testing release.