Google introduced the Material You design language to smartphones and tablets with Android 12 and improved it further with Android 13. Samsung introduced its own Material You-inspired Color Palette feature with One UI 4/0 and offered even better UI customization with One UI 5.0. In the future, Google plans to bring Material You to Wear OS smartwatches.
New code spotted in the Android 14 codebase reveals that Google is working on bringing fun dynamic color customizations to Wear OS-based smartwatches. Inside Android 14's settings, 9To5Google has spotted a new string called ‘DYNAMIC_COLOR_THEME_ENABLED' for smartwatches. Wear OS 3, which is currently the base of the Galaxy Watch 4 series and the Galaxy Watch 5 series, uses Android 11 as its base. Since Material You was introduced with Android 12, it never made it to Wear OS 3.
With the next big version of Wear OS, Google could move to Android 14 directly and introduce Material You's Dynamic Color feature. Similar to how Samsung introduced that feature as Color Palette in One UI 4.0, it could bring Material You with the next version of One UI Watch to its Wear OS-based smartwatches in the future.
Since Wear OS smartwatches lack wallpapers and have watch faces instead, it is unclear as to how Material You would work on those devices. One idea floating around is that a smartwatch could theme its UI based on the wallpaper that's chosen on a paired Android smartphone. It could be months before we see this feature on Samsung smartwatches.
SamsungGalaxy Watch (46mm)
SamsungGalaxy Watch 5
