The Wear OS 4 update was announced during the Google I/O 2023 event. Wear OS 4 is based on Android 13, a significant upgrade from Android 11, which formed the base for Wear OS 3.5. Wear OS 4 will be released to the Galaxy Watch 4 and the Galaxy Watch 5, bringing battery life improvements and better apps. The update will also bring Material You design to the smartwatches.
It was reported a couple of months ago that Google was working on Material You for Wear OS. Now that the Developer Preview version of Wear OS 4 is out, experts have played with it to find the existence of Material You UI design elements in the software. Although the feature wasn't announced by Google, developers have found accent colors in the software, especially in the quick settings section.
It is being reported that Google is now allowing watch faces to report their colors to the operating system via the Wear Watchface API. Those colors can then be used by the operating system in various places, such as buttons, toggles, icons, and even text. Google doesn't seem to have completed the entire implementation of Material You in Wear OS 4, but it is expected that future updates will allow accent colors to be changed based on the watch face.
Android 11 lacked Material You and Google introduced it with Android 12. Since Samsung's smartwatches will get the Wear OS 4 update as a part of One UI 5 Watch later this year, the feature will come to the Galaxy Watch 4 series and the Galaxy Watch 5 series, just as the Color Palette feature came to Galaxy phones and tablets with the One UI 4 update.
