Android 15 offers fewer color choices for background-based themes

The rollout of Android 15 for Pixel devices doesn’t seem to be going as smoothly as Google would have hoped. Aside from the update missing some of the advertised features, we also came across several reports from Pixel users who were facing an annoying bug in the Instagram app. While Google has confirmed that the missing features will be available to users in the next few weeks and Instagram has already released an update to fix the Stories issue, there is a bug in the latest Android version that appears to have slipped under Google’s radar .

The background-based design system in Android 15 has a small issue. This affects the Background Colors carousel in Wallpaper and Style settings on Pixel devices, which provides a choice of color combinations based on your current wallpaper for theme icons, text, and other UI elements. Instead of offering a selection of unique color combinations, the carousel displays multiple duplicates.

The attached screenshots show duplicate color combinations at opposite ends of the carousel. The selection changes when you switch to a different wallpaper, but you only get a few unique options and a number of duplicates. Google was made aware of this issue when it was first discovered in the fourth beta version of Android 15 in July, but it is still present in the stable version that rolled out to Pixel devices earlier this week.

According to an entry in Google’s issue tracker, the Google employee responsible for the bug concluded that the feature worked as intended. However, the carousel offered more unique color combinations and no duplicates in the previous Android version.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like a fix is ​​in the works, as the issue tracker entry has received a status of “Unable to fix (intended behavior)”. A separate entry on the same issue notes that there is still someone associated with the bug, but There have been no updates on this since August.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment on this matter and to find out whether this is actually intended behavior or a bug. We will update this post as soon as we have further details.