Android 16 Beta expands Material You 4 with adaptive typography and color roles

Design · 4 min read

Android 16 Beta introduces Material You 4, which extends dynamic color to include semantic color roles and adaptive typography that responds to viewport, user preferences, and accessibility needs. Designers can now define type scale maps that adapt between small phones and large foldables.

The updated theming engine exposes composable color roles that can be mapped to theme tokens at build time, allowing designers to create a single palette that scales across form factors. Google also released guidelines and tooling to convert existing Material palettes to the new role-based model.

Alongside developer previews, Android Studio added a Theme Mapper to test role substitutions and a typography simulator. Google says the changes are aimed at large apps that need systematic theming across multiple product surfaces and hardware configurations.