Material You for Chromebooks just showed up in the Canary channel, and it’s beautiful

Wow – just wow. Back when I created my Material You for ChromeOS mock-up from scratch to show what the operating system could and probably would look like, I had no idea that we would actually get it. I also didn’t realize how accurate my mock-up would end up being.

Over on Reddit today, the official Material You design for Chromebooks just appeared (ChromeOS Canary). There certainly are major differences to what I created, but this is just the very first iteration of a color and theme picker that’s explicitly tied to the user’s wallpaper. I’m sure that over time, this will evolve to be more polished and rounded off.

At this time, the new UI is crashing most devices where the owner enables the flag for it, but Kentexcitebot on Reddit was able to snap the screenshots you see above displaying a few different color variations. What you’re seeing is a pink and green theme in both light and dark modes.

The accented areas like the Quick setting toggles and sliders are a darker color so they stand out from the gorgeous tinted window title bars, shelf, quick settings, and backdrop of windows. I hope that in the future, Google turns the toggles into rectangle tiles and the volume and brightness sliders thicker like you see in my mock-up below and on Android 12+, but we’ll have to wait to see what comes of it.

In the meantime, we’re going to get this up and running on our devices so that we can further explore it. My hope is that this comes to the masses sooner rather than much later. We’ve already been waiting for it for quite some time, but I would prefer that it’s fully developed before release, so I can be patient, I suppose. Let me know in the comments what you think of the first pass of Material You for your laptop and if you’ll use it when it drops.