Android 11 may actually bring multi-colored quick settings icons to the table. Android 11 Developer Preview 1 arrived quite recently, and it revealed quite a few details when it comes to Google’s next iteration of Android.
This is one of those not-so-obvious changes in Android 11
A number of those new features / changes are obvious, others, not so much. Well, we’re here to talk about yet another not-so-obvious change that may be included.
XDA Developers dug into the Android 11 system dump for the Pixel 4, and found something interesting. A new class called “QSColorController” has been spotted in SystemUI.
That class is responsible for overriding the color of tiles in the Quick Settings panel. It’s actually possible to individually change the colors of each Quick Setting tile this way.
If you check out the image provided above, you’ll see what I mean. The Wi-Fi icon is yellow in this example. The Bluetooth icon is blue, while the screen rotation one is red. You can see some additional examples in the provided image.
The colors that can be chosen this way, at the moment, are yellow, red, green, and blue. Google will probably add more colors in the future.
As already mentioned, this option is not exactly obvious in Android 11 Developer Preview 1, but it may become available to everyone by the time the stable comes knocking.
It’s actually possible Google will expand the Pixel Themes app by adding multi-colored quick settings icons to it in Android 11. This is just a wild guess, though, it remains to be seen what will happen.
Multi-colored Quick Settings icons probably won’t be exclusive to Pixel phones in Android 11
Do note that XDA’s Zachary Wander actually managed to get this working on the Android 11 emulator in Android Studio. This suggests that the feature will not be limited to Pixel phones, and those are great news.
It seems like Android 11 will pack quite a few changes, other than the obvious ones Google announced. We still have two Developer Previews to go through, and three Beta builds, before stable arrives.
Android 11 stable build is set to arrive sometime in Q3 this year. Pixel phones will be the first to get it, of course, while others will follow soon after.
Google has never released Developer Preview for a new version of Android sooner than this year. The company did it so that OEMs can start developing Android 11 for their phones early. This will hopefully result in extremely fast updates to Android 11, at least for some OEMs.