MIUI finally gets Material You support but there’s a catch

Zohaib Ahmed — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 12:03:14 +0000

Xiaomi unveiled MIUI 13 along with its flagship Xiaomi 12 series on December 28th in China. And although the bump in the version number of the software skin may lead one to believe it’s a major upgrade, that sadly isn’t the case at all. Not only does MIUI 13 give a miss to most of the Android 12-specific features but also omits any of the dynamic wallpaper theming we have seen OEMs like Google, Samsung, and OPPO implement.

This appears to be changing, though, with the latest beta builds of MIUI 13. Telegram channel MIUI Beta Info has reported that the most recent MIUI 13 beta builds support Material You adaption, which is clear from a couple of screenshots shared by them:

As seen above, setting a wallpaper with a pinkish primary color now triggers Android 12’s monet theme engine, effectively dying the Google Calculator app pink. Changing the wallpaper to a green one has a similar effect and the app themes itself green accordingly.

Such behavior was previously broken as Google apps stayed put with their default bluish hues no matter the wallpaper.

While the new theming capabilities are undoubtedly quite cool, there’s also a major catch. Unfortunately, the Material You coloring is limited to Google apps alone, and the MIUI system and apps interfaces stay static as they had on MIUI 12.5.

What’s worse is that Xiaomi hasn’t announced any plans of following the new dynamic wallpaper-based theming trend either, meaning it will take a while for it to make it to MIUI, if at all. Still, a code commit in Google’s Material Components library titled “Add supporting manufacturer list of dynamic colors” had also mentioned Xiaomi, so there’s some hope.

MIUI 13 Material You support Archives - Gizmochina

MIUI finally gets Material You support but there’s a catch