Google introduced the Material You design language to smartphones and tablets via Android 12, and further refined it in Android 13. Samsung adopted the Material You concept and developed a Color Palette feature for One UI 4.0, which they improved upon in One UI 5.0 to offer superior UI customization. Google intends to extend the Material You design to Wear OS smartwatches in the future.
Recent code discovered in the Android 14 codebase suggests that Google is developing dynamic color customizations to apply to Wear OS-based smartwatches, which could offer users a fun, customized experience. 9To5Google noticed a new string called ‘DYNAMIC_COLOR_THEME_ENABLED’ for smartwatches in Android 14’s settings. Currently, Wear OS 3 is based on Android 11, so Material You was not integrated into it despite being launched in Android 12. This implies that Google intends to bring Material You to Wear OS devices soon.
In the next significant release of Wear OS, Google may choose to skip directly to Android 14 and include Material You’s Dynamic Color feature. Samsung could also introduce Material You to their Wear OS-based smartwatches in the future via the next version of One UI Watch, following how they added the feature as Color Palette in One UI 4.0.
It’s uncertain how Material You would function on Wear OS watches since they use watch faces rather than wallpapers. However, one theory proposes that a smartwatch could adapt its UI based on the wallpaper picked on an associated Android smartphone. It may be several months before Samsung’s smartwatches receive this feature.