With its Material You design language, Google is having a great year. I've written ad nauseam about where the stunning, new aesthetic components occur, so I won't go into detail this time. They are encroaching on every facet of the company's ecology. Basically, you'll discover modernised, rounded corners, layered two-tone palettes, and more on whatever Google app or service you visit.
Obviously, ChromeOS is included in this as well. We've steadily seen Material You come to life with official updates ever since I made my design mock-up of what it would ultimately look like on Google's laptop operating system. However, all I actually did was model it after Android 13's visual cues and foresee that Google would do so when it eventually decided to update Chromebooks. I wish I could claim credit for being that inventive.
It turns out I was right, and everything has been updated to appear like the Android 13-style ChromeOS I designed last year, including the shelf, fast settings tiles, volume and brightness sliders, notifications, and more. According to C2 Productions on Twitter, the Material You makeover for Chromebooks will now include the themed icons trick that Android has introduced on handsets as of the most recent version of the OS to provide everything loaded on your device a cohesive colour scheme.
They are going to be sleek as hell, even if we don't yet have a vision of what this will look like. Think about the themed icons you can see in the picture I took with my Pixel 6 Pro running Android 13 above. Now picture them with plenty of room to the left and right of them along the bottom of your Chromebook's shelf.
Once this upgrade is released, the full package will be finished, and ChromeOS's aesthetics will genuinely have a "suit and tie" appearance. Though I'm really thrilled, I do have a worry. Theme-based icons are probably only going to be used for system icons. If Google could figure out a method to give PWAs or "web apps" the same look based on the dynamic colours of your wallpaper and system settings, I would be ecstatic. It's interesting to note that an upcoming upgrade to Android will enable customised icons for any programme loaded from the Google Play Store, even if it wasn't preinstalled.
Now, if this technology could be applied to web apps, there would be nothing left on my Chromebook to make it look unattractive. For instance, the SunTrust Bank emblem resembled a fuzzy porcupine (rest in peace, apparently). When I worked in shops selling and supporting ChromeOS, I used to "instal" it or create a shortcut for my Chromebook customers, and it was just the worst offender of providing a subpar.ico image.
My main worry is with web apps that have more than two colours in their colour scheme, even if there are no blurry icons or web developers who fail to upload anything at all that appears when you make a shortcut on your laptop. I don't think Google could separate this out and produce a fully unique symbol for non-system apps, even using machine learning and AI via a themed icons trick. Let's hope I'm mistaken!
