ChromeOS to Material You: Work continues with dynamic themes and more

Slowly but surely, Google is completing the redesign of ChromeOS with a complete redesign of the interface towards the Material You style. Over the months we’ve seen several separate projects that led to the introduction of Dynamic Colors, Material 3-style components (like buttons), and improvements to the Files app, and now some of them can be force-activated, as noted by Kent Duke, C2 Productions, and Futur3Sn0w on Twitter. Let’s see them together in detail.

Dynamic colors
The most obvious change is to Dynamic Colors, which lets you change system colors based on the background, as happens in Android 12 and 13. As you can see in the screenshots below Below, work appears to be well advanced, and much of the ChromeOS framework appears to be in place. The Apps list, Quick Settings, and Files app now reflect a particular theme, but unfortunately not based on your current wallpaper. In fact, there seem to be only two themes: Bordeaux Red and Mint Green, each featuring a light and dark variant, which ChromeOS picks rather at random.

Quick settings
Quick settings have also completely changed. The work isn’t done yet, as the title and subtitle suggest, but we can still see a number of new things. First, the settings have been redesigned and look nearly identical to those found on Pixel phones, as have the volume and screen brightness sliders, which do feature icons though (the sun for brightness or the top speaker for volume) on the side of the slider instead of inside. Some simple one-click options like “Screenshot” are half the size of the others to save space. The other change concerns notifications, which are no longer above the quick settings but in a dedicated area to the left of the calendar.

Calendar and notifications
The calendar follows the color of the system interface, as do the notifications which, as we anticipated above, have their own dedicated area. Other than that, they look the same as before.

Application files
The ChromeOS Files app also received the new colors and now uses two-tone background colors, more text colors, and a light accent tone to indicate your current selection.

All in all, we can say that ChromeOS completely embraces the Material You style, and a Pixel phone owner will feel right at home right away.
That said, there is still a lot of work to do. Chrome, for example, has not yet been updated and does not support dynamic system colors. It’s hard to say when we will receive the new interface, but at the current rate of development we can think of 2023.