Applying the System Color Scheme to Your Square Home

As you may already know,

Google introduced the Material You theme system in Android 12. One of the most important features of the Material You theme is the dynamic color system, which allows you to personalize the color scheme of the theme to your taste. This can be achieved by selecting the desired color scheme when setting the wallpaper in the system settings, as shown in the figure.

Dynamic color system of Android 12

You can find more information about Material You design at the following article.

Everything you need to know about Material Design 3

The newly released Square Home (version 3) fully supports Material You's dynamic color system. Once you've selected your preferred color palette in the system settings, here's how to apply it to the user interface of Square Home.

1. Open the Home option.

2. Go to the "Behavior and UI" section.

3. Enable the "Dynamic color theme" option. (Android 12 and above)

Before applying the Dynamic color theme

After applying the Dynamic color theme

Now let's change the color of the tiles to match the color of the system.

The option to dynamically change the color of the tiles when the wallpaper changes has already been supported since Square Home version 1.7. See my previous post, Adaptive Tile Colors to the Wallpaper. Square Home version 3 provides the option to dynamically apply the color scheme of your system to the first 9 tile styles out of a total of 15 tile styles. Here's how to apply it.

1. Open the Home option.

2. Go to the "Tile size and style" section.

3. Enable the option "Apply the system colors." (Android 12 and above)

Applying the system colors

There is still one more way to make your theme even more perfect.

Android 13 started supporting the Themed icon feature, which uses monochrome app icons to dynamically change the color of icons. However, for this feature to work fully, all installed apps must offer a monochrome icon, and many older apps (even newer ones) don't offer a monochrome icon. However, Square Home gives you the option to create monochrome icons for these apps as well. To apply this,

1. Open the Home option.

2. Go to the "Icon style" section.

3. Enable the "Themed icon" and "Force themed icon" options together. (Android 13 and above)

Fully applying themed icons

Enjoy your Android with Square Home 3!

Understanding Tile Background Effects

Square Home currently supports a total of five tile background effects. Go to Home options > Tile sizes and styles > Background effect and select one of the following effects. 1. Disabled This is the default value when you first install the launcher. You can disable the wallpaper or use System wallpaper or App wallpaper to use this effect. If you disable the wallpaper, it uses a black background color, which you can change in Home options > Behavior and UI > Background color. It looks a bit boring at first, but you can use different tile colors and rounded corners to create a nice screen like this. Background effect disabled When using a wallpaper, you can also customize the tile style color to be translucent so that you can see the wallpaper behind the tiles, as shown in the following picture. Applying translucent tile styles on a wallpaper If you want to apply adaptive tile colors here, please refer to the following post. Adaptive Tile Colors to the Wallpaper 2. Blurred S

Live Tiles

Live tile is one of the most attractive features of Windows phone. It displays continuously useful information on tiles in real time with charming animations. There are several ways to make tiles "Live" on Square home as well. I'm sure you could make your home awesome by applying the following ways. 1. Displaying notifications on tile When you get a notification from an app, you should expand the notification panel from the status bar to see the content. Now you do not have to pull down the status bar anymore because Square home displays the notification on the app tile that is added into your page. Notifications on tile To activate this feature, - go to "Live tile" in Home options. - select "Notifications". - enable Square home in the notification access. The app icon and notification text are switched continuously on the tile with some cool animation. If the notification contains a picture in its content, it will be displayed as

Now Supports Foldable Devices!

There's a great news! A new update (v2.2) has been released and it starts supporting foldable devices finally. As you know, the previous versions already support different layouts for different screen orientation. When you set "Screen orientation" to "Same as system", you can layout the tiles differently for the portrait and the landscape mode. Layout transition on screen rotation For a foldable device like Samsung Fold 2, you should have enabled "Tablet mode" that supports horizontal scrolling to use the launcher properly. Yes, it's not good enough though. The new update supports the different screen size, for folded and unfolded, in the same way while "Tablet mode" is off. You can build the layouts differently like the following screenshots. Folded Unfolded Enjoy your foldable device!

Square Home

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