ColorBlendr

Since Android 12, the system builds a set of colors from your wallpaper and applies them to the system and to apps that support it; Google calls this Material You. ColorBlendr, by Mahmudul Hasan, lets you choose those colors yourself instead.

What it does

From the project’s README:

• Pick any seed color, or one of a set of basic colors, with a live preview before you apply it.
• Fine-tuning: sliders for accent saturation, background saturation and background lightness, ready-made Monet style presets, a pitch-black dark mode, tinted text, and your own secondary and tertiary colors.
• Full control: override any single shade across the whole palette, with separate settings for light and dark mode.
• Backup and restore of your whole setup to a file.
• Community creations: a gallery of color themes made by other users, which you can browse, upvote and share to (more below).

Root, Shizuku or wireless ADB

ColorBlendr works in any of the three modes, but the developer recommends root “if you want to have the full experience”. With root, the README says, it changes the colors at run time through Android’s overlay system “without creating any permanent files”; without root it uses adb commands, and some features are greyed out. Applying a community creation needs root, while browsing and upvoting work in every mode. See how to start Shizuku if you go that way.

Community creations and the network

The theming itself happens on the phone. According to the privacy policy bundled with version 3.0.1, ColorBlendr goes online for two things only: the profile pictures of its contributors and translators, and the optional community gallery. The gallery needs no account, but it isn’t free of identifiers:

• Browsing downloads the public list of creations from the jsDelivr CDN, which serves them from a public GitHub repository; the policy says no account or identifier is needed for this.
• Upvoting sends a salted SHA-256 hash of the device ID to a Cloudflare Worker run by the developer, and the server stores a salted hash of your IP address next to it, so that each person gets one vote. The 3.0 release notes add that apply counts are tracked with the same kind of device hash.
• Sharing a creation uploads the palette with the name, description and optional author name you type, all of which become public. Submissions pass Cloudflare’s Turnstile bot check and are published as a pull request on GitHub, where a person reviews them. For rate limiting, the server keeps the same two hashes; reporting a creation works the same way.

The developer says neither hash can be reversed to identify you. That is the server’s side, which we can’t check.

About this file

• This is the developer’s own build, from IzzyOnDroid, signed with the developer’s key (SHA-256 fingerprint starting 4A:F4:FF:A1), the same key that signs Iconify. F-Droid ships the same developer-signed file.
• Our scan found no tracker libraries. ColorBlendr isn’t on Google Play.
• The 6.5 MB file runs on Android 12 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit, and declares 16 permissions, 4 of which need your approval.
• ColorBlendr is licensed under GPL-3.0.

Shizuku API. Uses the Shizuku API, so it can do ADB-level work without root once Shizuku is running. (rikka.shizuku.ShizukuProvider)

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the IzzyOnDroid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.