Material You is a privacy issue. It gives a reason for people to have a custom wallpaper.Because of the WallpaperColors API, any third party app can use the wallpaper to generate a unique ID based on that
You make this sound mich worse than it is:
Exposes the 3 most visually representative colors of a wallpaper.
Source: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/WallpaperColors
Android really needs a sandbox feature for apps you don’t trust (or just any by Meta)
You can leverage the work profile with something like Shelter
Can we have unlimited sandboxes for each app though?
Nope, one sandbox per device
Ah I see
Haven’t tried Shelter but I am using Insular from F-Droid for just that and it works great.
Samsung has that in Secure Folder. Hardware-based isolation.
it’s completely proprietary tho (Samsung knox stuff is reaching scary levels of obfuscation and proprietary-ness in general)
I’m pretty sure apps can just grab your phone’s MAC address
You can for older devices (so your app has to target only those I think) but with added permissions that you will definitely question It seems it is more complex or impossible now: https://developer.android.com/training/articles/user-data-ids#mac-addresses
So it doesn’t simply supply the generated palette from the system? (I never tried implementing Material You)
It does
Ah alright, so it is a problem because it can be used as another bit of information to construct a more refined fingerprint of the user?
Uhm… yeah…, sure, could certainly be another data point for that. I think you can also set static colora thought.
Yes, though now that the option exists setting it to anything would discriminate you from the group that set it the other way, I assume that the OP also considered that as problematic
I didn’t throw rocks at Material You for being an actual privacy leak but just thinking about the fact that it gives a reason for users to want to use a custom wallpaper instead of default or unicolor I woild have fell for it if I was not already aware of that WallpaperColors API
Wouldn’t this ID change every time the user changes their wallpaper?
It does. But it also means that if you want to reset the tracking you would need (for every app) to also clear the storage of the app and logging off and log back in with a different account before starting to use the app again
True, but even without your wallpaper fingerprint, the app is still fingerprinting you and tracking you with cookies.
So that still always applies, material you just means you need to take the extra step of changing your wallpaper when you clean cache and change account.
Are you this insufferable always?
Someone explain please
Material you changes the android colour palette based on the colours in your background image.
Looks like pywal does the same for your terminal.
Material You: sets all the colours of your phone according to the colours of your wallpaper
Pywal: sets all the colours of your Linux desktop (terminal colours, GTK theme, config files derived from template files) according to the colours of your wallpaper
What I don’t get is how often are people looking at their wallpapers? I see mine for a couple seconds before all the screen real estate gets taken by apps or monitoring etc.
It’s to get a cohesive theme across all applications, so, even if you don’t see the wallpaper, it overrides the default app themes that would all clash with each other otherwise
I use a tiling window manager, and it maximizes that behavior. I still have wallpapers, because I spend most of my time in terminals, and they’re set to something like 90% opacity. I can still see the wallpapers, but it’s subtle. Inactive, non-terminal windows get 80% opacity, so I see it more there.
I read it as paywall and was confused af
“To change your device theme color to the ones matching your wallpaper, consider paying for a subscription”
Removed by mod
Worse. You can’t turn it off :/
Wrong.
How do you turn it off?
