Android Q Beta 4 has dropped, and now early adopters are finding out just what’s new with this newest beta for the newest version of Android.
Google has already given users some theming options with the first few previews of Android Q, but with the fourth beta, there are now some more theming options.
Specifically, we’re seeing new accent colors available for Android Q. These are available in the Developer Options (in the “Theming” section towards the bottom). That means that these may not be available in the final version of Android Q. As we’ve seen in previous years, some features that aren’t fully finished, appear in Developer Options in the betas, then get removed in the final version. So keep that in mind.
With Android Q Beta 4, there are now eight accent colors, up from the original four. Included is Black, Green, Purple, Cinnamon, Ocean, Space and Orchid. The first three (along with the device default) were available on the first beta. It’s kind of obvious, since those are just color names, and not anything special like the latter four are. Something that Google has shied away from with its smartphones.
These colored accents look pretty good, even in dark mode. The black option, for example, will turn the foreground for things like toggles, white, and the icons black. As you can see in the gallery below. Some of the other colors look really nice, my personal favorite is the ocean and cinnamon colors. The orchid color is more of a fuschia, which could be an elaborate troll by Google, as a sign of what’s to come in the next few years.
OnePlus has been doing these colored accents in Oxygen OS for a couple of years now. It’s one of the many theming options that OnePlus offers to its users. Though it is a bit more robust than what Google has done here with Android Q. With Oxygen OS, you are able to see the colors before selecting them, and you also have a color picker, so you can pick your favorite color, down to each alphanumeric character in the hex code. Which makes things very granular. Don’t like the color blue that OnePlus has picked? Well you can change that pretty easily.
Google hasn’t given users a whole lot of options for theming in the past few years, so it would be nice to have the ability to adjust the accents that you see throughout the OS. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up for it with Android Q. It looks like Google is still testing this out, and possibly adding more colors to the mix. If I were a betting man, I’d say that this will come with Android R next year. Which is unfortunate, as it does look really nice, but that is what will likely happen.
This is the fourth beta for Android Q, with two more set to come before the final stable build is made available, likely in late August. So this is a nearly finished beta build of Android Q.
