Themed Icon Support (Material You)

[moertel]

Hey everyone! Idea time :)

I know at least two Devs in this community who have monochrome icon packs. I'd love to be able to support Android 13's themed icons[1] (the ones that automatically change their tint to match wallpaper/theme colours) but I actually don't know whether that's possible from within CandyBar and what would be required.

It sounds like Google Pixel and Samsung support themed icons. On Samsung, icons can be replaced with their proprietary app Theme Park. So perhaps I only need to include adaptive icons according to Google's guide[2] to make it work?

If anyone knows more, please chime in.

[1] https://9to5google.com/2022/02/10/android-13-dp1-themed-icon-material-you/
[2] https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/views/launch/icon_design_adaptive#user-theming

[Donnnno]

Hey I would love to have something like this too!

From my understanding (this was a while ago), theming is something that has to be done on the launchers side, idk if this still the case tho.
(Arcticons-Team/Arcticons#37)

Also Kvaesito and TinyBit can override the color already

[moertel]

Google Pixel and Samsung OneUI support this since Android 13, but only the latter has a mechanism to use custom icon packs.

From the docs, it seems that having adaptive icons and adding a monochrome tag is all that's needed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
...
<adaptive-icon xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <background android:drawable="@drawable/ic_launcher_background" />
    <foreground android:drawable="@drawable/ic_launcher_foreground" />
    
    // Starting with Android 13 (API level 33), you can opt-in to providing a
    // <monochrome> drawable.
    <monochrome android:drawable="@drawable/ic_launcher_monochrome" />
</adaptive-icon>

So if I read this correctly, it's actually not a CandyBar thing; we could do this ourselves. 🤔 Then the only challenge is finding launchers that already support this interface.

[Donnnno]

Exactly.

Here are two examples of the adaptive colors applied to two totally random icons packs in Kvaesito Launcher:

[moertel]

Do you know how Kvaesito is doing it? As it's a launcher, it can probably manipulate everything it displays, but that doesn't exactly help us as icon pack developers unless there's an agreed-upon interface (like offering the monochrome tag in the adaptive icon).

[Donnnno]

Just noticed that this was added a while ago to Arcticons, but it turns icons themable with lawnchair and other launchers that added this intent :

             <!-- Lawnchair Launcher -->
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="app.lawnchair.icons.THEMED_ICON" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            </intent-filter>