How to customize your Android 13 Pixel’s color palette

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The ability to match your phone's colors to your wallpaper is one of the new features in the new version of the operating system.

You couldn't theme icons that were offered by other companies. It changed some of the icons on my home page, but not all of them, when I tried it out on a Pixel 3 using the latest version of the operating system. The normal multicolored icons looked better to me. The third-party icons were the same as they were.

The ability to have your icons follow a color palette has been expanded to more icons as long as the developers have adjusted their coding. When I turned on the themed icons on my phone, the only other app I could find that was in line with the new theme was Bitwarden, which I had never heard of before. There is a running list of third-party apps that are compatible with the theme of the company.

Related

How Android 12 lets you customize your phone’s color palette

It is nice to have the look of your home page. Would you be interested in trying it out yourself? It's easy.

Choose your wallpaper

The first thing we need to do is choose a wallpaper.

• Long-press on an empty part of your homescreen until you see the pop-up menu.
• Select Wallpaper & style.
• Tap on the Change wallpaper link just below the two representations (the home and lock screens) of your current wallpaper.

• Tap on one of the categories presented on the wallpaper screen, and then select a specific image. Or tap on the top button called My photos to select one of your own photos.
• Once you select your image, you’ll be shown a preview of what it will look like on your homescreen and lock screen. (Two buttons below the preview image let you toggle between the two.) If you’re satisfied, tap the check mark in the bottom-right corner.
• A pop-up menu will give you the choice of using the wallpaper on the homescreen, your lock screen, or both. And you’re done! You’ll find yourself back on your home page — with your new wallpaper.

Tweak your theme

You can try the themed icons if you go back to the style page. There is a picture of my wallpaper with normal app icons and themed icons on it. It will be interesting to see how many other apps implement the ability to use themes with the icon in the future.

The app grid can be changed so that you get less larger icons on each home page, which is useful for those who find current icons too small.

Switch color combinations

Depending on your wallpaper photo, you can choose a different color combo for your theme.

• On the Wallpaper & style page, select Wallpaper colors and choose one of the color combinations shown. You can also tap on Basic colors if you want something, well, basic.

While these style combinations won't affect your phone's efficiency or performance, the idea that you can change the look of your screen is nice.