Android App Theming With Material You and Dynamic Color

Material You brought something genuinely new to Android theming: apps that pick up colors from the user's wallpaper, so the whole system feels personal and coherent. It's a lovely effect, but it raises a real question for app developers — how do you embrace dynamic color without your brand dissolving into whatever someone set as their background? The answer is a deliberate theming setup that treats dynamic color as an option, not a takeover.

How Dynamic Color Works

On Android 12 and up, the system generates a color scheme from the user's wallpaper, and your app can opt into using it. In Compose, that's a dynamic color scheme you pass to your

MaterialTheme

val colorScheme = when {
    dynamicColor && Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.S ->
        if (dark) dynamicDarkColorScheme(context)
        else dynamicLightColorScheme(context)
    dark -> DarkColors
    else -> LightColors
}
MaterialTheme(colorScheme = colorScheme, content = content)

The structure to notice: dynamic color is one branch, and you always have your own brand scheme as the fallback for older devices and for users or screens where dynamic color doesn't fit.

Decide Where Brand Wins

The key design decision is which surfaces follow the wallpaper and which stay branded. For many apps, letting the general UI adopt dynamic color while keeping a few signature brand elements fixed is the right balance — the app feels personal but still recognizably yours. For a brand-heavy app, you might keep your own scheme entirely and skip dynamic color. There's no universal answer; what matters is making it a conscious choice rather than either ignoring Material You or surrendering your identity to it wholesale.

Use Semantic Color Roles

The thing that makes Material theming robust is that you never reference raw colors in your UI — you reference roles.

primary

onPrimary

surface

onSurface

error

Get Dark Theme Right

Dark theme is not just inverting colors. Proper dark surfaces are dark grays, not pure black, and elevation is expressed through subtle surface tinting rather than shadows. The

onSurface

onBackground

Test Across Wallpapers and Versions

The catch with dynamic color is that it changes per user, so you can't fully predict it from one device. I test with a few very different wallpapers to make sure the app stays legible and pleasant across the range of schemes the system might generate, and I verify the static brand fallback on devices below Android 12. The combination — embrace dynamic color where it adds delight, keep a solid branded fallback, and build everything on semantic roles — gives you an app that feels at home on Material You without losing its identity or breaking on older phones.

The thread tying all of this together is that good theming is a system, not a pile of color choices. When your UI is built on semantic roles and your theme cleanly branches between dynamic, light, and dark schemes, supporting a new mode is nearly free, because every screen already asks for

primary

onSurface

Key Takeaways

• Treat dynamic color as one branch with your own brand scheme always available as the fallback for older devices and key surfaces.
• Consciously decide which surfaces follow the wallpaper and which stay branded, rather than ignoring or fully surrendering to Material You.
• Build UI on semantic color roles (
  code Copy

  primary

  ,
  code Copy

  onSurface

  , etc.), never hardcoded hex, so it adapts across light, dark, and dynamic schemes.
• Do dark theme properly — dark grays over pure black, tint-based elevation, readable contrast — and test every screen in both themes.
• Test dynamic color across several wallpapers and verify the static fallback below Android 12.