Android with a bit more colourful settings

 Introduction of new colourful  Material Design theme by Google 

How many times a day you navigate to Google.com to look up something on the internet? Modern browsers allow you to search directly from the address bar, so there are few reasons to load up Google Search's homepage. As part of new, more expressive design, the Android Settings app will have colourful icons on its homepage. Following are the some of the important points:-

Google is preparing to make the icons on the Settings homepage more colourful.

It’s unclear if coloured icons are part of Google’s new Material Design 3 Expressive theme.

This is part of Google’s effort to redesign the Settings app to be more expressive.

Earlier, there was an evidence indicating Google will introduce an expressive new Material Design theme at next month’s Google I/O developer conference. Although several mentions and potential examples of this new theme have surfaced, the specifics of what the updated framework entails remain unclear. However, in the latest Android beta released recently, we noticed new evidence suggesting that colourful icons could be part of Google’s updated design guidelines. First let's learn how to Customize Chrome's Homepage:-

Are you a Google Chrome user? If so, chances are your homepage is set to Google already, which adds a few shortcuts to Google's usually minimalist screen. Unlike the Google website, current version of Google Search only follows the default theme setting of your operating system. To customize Chrome's homepage, click the Customize Chrome link in the bottom-right of the screen to open options related to appearance, shortcuts and what Google calls Cards. Change the colour of Chrome's homepage and menus by choosing one of the pre-set colours in the menu or selecting the colour option.

For more options, click Change theme to see several available categories. You can set your homepage to feature Chrome's brand colours, or select among collections of landscapes, space, art and various artists. Each options gives you a background and colour themes. You can also upload your own picture to use as a background.

From the Customize Chrome menu, you can also tell Google whether or not you want to show shortcuts on the homepage. Enable My shortcuts to manually set what websites should be included or Most visited sides to have Google suggest websites based on how often you visit them. Lastly, Google has a Cards section which allows you to see recent Google Drive files, shopping carts and recipes. You can turn this section OFF or disable certain components.

You can also customize your Google homepage on Chrome with the help of themes from the Chrome Web Store. Open the Customize Chrome menu and click Change Theme, then choose the Chrome Web Store listing at the bottom. (Or open Settings > Appearance > Theme.). Choose the Themes tab on the web store sidebar to search through various categories. Click into a category, then select a theme you like and choose Add to Chrome to download the theme and apply it to your Google page.

While the fourth beta of Android 16 doesn’t bring major UI changes, Google did introduce updates to the expressive redesign it’s developing for Settings. Specifically, the Settings homepage is getting colourful new icons for each entry. Currently, these entries feature simple grey, borderless icons to the left of the text. In the expressive redesign, however, these same icons are now enclosed within circles of different colours, adding some visual flair to the page. We have different settings homepage currently in the latest Android 15 release and in Android 16 Beta 4 with the expressive redesign enabled. The ‘Digital Wellbeing & parental controls’ entry retains its grey icon because it’s supplied by the separate Digital Wellbeing app, not the Settings app itself. This inconsistency shows Google still has work to do before rolling out the expressive redesign. As a result, we don’t expect this new design, or the colourful icons, to appear in the initial stable release of Android 16. Instead, the updated Settings look will likely debut in a later Android 16 quarterly release, or perhaps even be held back until Android 17 release.

It’s possible that the colours and iconography could change before this new design officially rolls out. Currently, there’s no apparent logic behind the specific background colour choices for each icon, although some related entries do seem to share the same colour for all the user's. The barebones aesthetic of Google.com keeps things simple and bright. Turn down the lights with dark mode. Click the Settings button in the lower-right corner of the screen, where you can toggle Dark theme ON and OFF to change the theme you see on Google Search results pages.