One UI 6 has issues with Material You color theming on Samsung phones

Google introduced Material You theming structure with Android 12 in 2021, and Samsung incorporated it into One UI 4.0 and named it Color Palette. While Google went pretty wild with the use of colors in its version of Android, Samsung kept it pretty subdued with One UI.

Material You is broken in One UI 6

Samsung now seems to be having issues with Material You theming on Galaxy phones. Starting with One UI 6.0, Material You seems to be broken inside Google apps. While it works decently inside Samsung and other apps (as you can see in the screenshots below), it isn't working inside Google apps, including Google Drive, Google Docs, and more.

We tested this bug on our Galaxy S23 Ultra and Galaxy S24+ running One UI 6.1. We selected a green wallpaper and green accent colors in Samsung's ‘Color Palette' menu. We can confirm that the green colors were nowhere to be found inside Google's apps (as you can see in the images below), which means the Material You feature is broken on One UI 6.0 and One UI 6.1.

It isn't clear if Samsung knows about this and if it is planning to fix this bug. Since the next big update will be Android 15-based One UI 7.0, the bug may only be solved at the end of this year.

Thanks for the tip, Federico Lombardo!

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Asif Iqbal Shaik - Senior Editor

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First Samsung device: T100

Asif is a computer engineer turned technology journalist. He has been using Samsung phones since 2004, and his current smartphone is the Galaxy S21 Ultra. He loves headphones, mechanical keyboards, and PC hardware. When not writing about technology, he likes watching crime and science fiction movies and TV shows.

Firmware Phone Android 14 Google One UI 6.0 One UI 6.1