Android 12 monet engine Archives - Gizmochina

Dynamic theming will come to Samsung, Xiaomi & other OEM’s Android 12 devices: Google

Sudhanshu — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 14:18:48 +0000

Along with the introduction of Android 12 came one of the most intriguing features offered on the new OS called Material You. With the help of the ‘monet’ theme engine, the new feature extracts colors from the current wallpaper and splashes it across the system UI and supported apps, giving users greater control than ever over what their phone’s software looks like.

So far, the feature has mostly been available on Google Pixel devices. But now, Google has officially announced that devices from Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, Xiaomi, Tecno, “and more” will all be getting the feature.

Yesterday (February 10, 2022), Google’s Android product manager Rohan Shah took to the Android Developers Blog to make the announcement stating “As more Android 12 devices land in the next couple months, our OEM partners are working with us to ensure that key design APIs, especially around dynamic color, work consistently across the Android ecosystem so developers can have peace of mind and users can benefit from a cohesive experience.”

Although the post didn’t mention any specific date or timeline on which Android 12 smartphone users can expect the feature to drop, however, considering how rocky the release of Android 12 has been so far, it does bring a sense of relief that Google is working closely with other OEMs to integrate the feature on their custom Android skins.

Earlier this week, a report surfaced stating that dynamic color themes will become a requirement for phones getting Android 12. “Referencing internal Google documentation, our source says that starting on March 14, Google will require that any new Android 12-based software builds submitted for Google Mobile Services (GMS) approval implement a dynamic theming engine that meets certain requirements.”

So it appears like the dynamic theming feature is here to stay and will soon be available on all Android devices running the latest Android 12 OS or higher in the future.

Material You-style wallpaper-based dynamic theming could soon turn compulsory for all OEMs

Zohaib Ahmed — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 10:02:57 +0000

Google has slowly but steadily been upgrading its software catalog to be Material You-compliant. Chrome OS and Search are among the latest to show hints of the new design language — but it doesn’t just end there. A new report suggests that dynamic theming will soon be turning compulsory if any Android 12 Android phone or tablet is to ship with Google services.

The source, which has spoken to Android Police, has picked off the information from internal Google documentation. It says that starting March 14, Google will require any new Android 12-based builds submitted for GMS (Google Mobile Services) approval to implement a dynamic theming engine. Certain conditions will be put in place alongside such as the ability to generate five tonal palettes based on a single source color.

It could be possible that this requirement will be going live with the release of Android 12L. The monet engine currently remains a Pixel-exclusive thingy and is yet to go full open source, but Android 12L is expected to integrate it fully into AOSP.

Manufacturers will thus have to create their own compliant dynamic theming engines or directly implement Google’s monet.

Android expert Mishaal Rahman says that some manufacturers like Xiaomi and Motorola have already started monet-related patches from Google’s internal Android 12L repository. Other manufacturers like Samsung chose to go with their own implementation of dynamic wallpaper-based theming, which while isn’t powered by monet, uses very similar logic.

Android 12’s wallpaper-based theming can crash your games in this funny little case

Zohaib Ahmed — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 08:45:29 +0000

Google has gone big on personalization this year with Android 12 and has implemented the ‘monet’ theme engine. This one extracts colors from the current wallpaper and splashes it across the system UI and supported apps, giving users greater control than ever over what their phone’s software looks like. However, the new engine has some unwarranted side effects affecting gamers.

A bug was opened on the Google Issue Tracker a couple of months back stating that games like Wild Rift and Pokémon Go crash as soon as the wallpaper is changed in the background on Android 12.

Android 12’s monet in action

But as it stands, the issue can actually be reproduced across all games. XDA Developers tested Genshin Impact, Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG Mobile, and Minecraft on a Google Pixel 6 Pro and found that all of them force closed upon switching the wallpaper.

While the use case where one changes the wallpaper while gaming is quite a rare one (who even does that?), the bug is still quite a bummer for those who rely on auto wallpaper changer apps.

Thankfully, the root cause of the problem has seemingly been spotted – Android configuration changes. A wallpaper change happens to be a configuration change on Android along with other activities like dark mode, screen rotation, and locale changes. Games typically used to ignore such changes but that isn’t the case anymore with Android 12.

Google has introduced a new change on the OS that forces activities to be recreated when the wallpaper is changed. This is reasonable enough for apps that need to respond to a wallpaper switch and color shift themselves accordingly, but is a problem for games as it triggers a force close.

Unfortunately, there isn’t any way to work around the problem. What’s even worse is that developers can’t get around it either. Google hasn’t provided an option to opt-out of the forced activity restart upon wallpaper switching yet, and games are suffering as a result.

The only solution at the moment is disabling any automatic wallpaper switchers while gaming and not changing wallpapers if you got a game running in the background.