Although there aren’t a lot of user-facing updates on the surface, users are already seeing some fascinating changes that have been included in Android 13 QPR2 Beta 2, which was recently published by Google for the Google Pixel series. According to the people who post on the Google News Telegram, Google is reportedly testing a feature whereby, if an app does not already have a customized icon, the app will have one that is instantly produced using a theme.
This new functionality is made available to developers in the form of a new flag with the name ENABLE FORCED MONO ICON. It is stated in the description that toggling the switch would allow the capability to make monochrome icons, even if the program does not offer this functionality by default.
The rationale for this is to help app developers who do not have a themed icon in their applications and who want to use the Google Pixel Launcher but are unable to do so because of this. On top of that, considering that the first wave of app developers to add themed icons will very certainly have already passed, the applications that are likely to have support for themed icons pretty much all do so at this moment. At the very least, users who like to have a unified home screen will be able to have all of their applications appear in roughly the same manner as a result of this.
It is still unknown whether or not this feature will emerge from the testing phase and become available to users. This kind of feature is put through its paces on a regular basis, but a significant number of others, across a wide variety of platforms, are discarded before the product is released. If, on the other hand, it continues to be a developer flag that may be enabled, then users who have root access should at the very least be able to coerce it into being enabled.
