Today, Google is releasing Android 12, the most significant update to the Android operating system in years. Google is starting to upload the source code for the new OS today, but the rollout of the Android 12 update to select Pixel phones comes later.

What’s new in Android 12?

The last few Android releases weren’t that exciting compared to Android 12. Following our first look at the new OS back in February, we knew we were in for big changes. Since there are so many new features, here’s a breakdown of some of the highlights:

Material You

By far the biggest change in Android 12 is Material You, the latest version of Google’s Material design language. Material You, as Google describes, “seeks to create designs that are personal for every style, accessible for every need, alive and adaptive for every screen.” When developing Android 12, Google created a new theme engine code-named “monet” that generates a rich palette of pastel colors derived from the user’s wallpaper. These colors are then applied to various parts of the system and their values are made available through an API that the user’s applications can call, thus letting apps decide whether they want to recolor their UI. Google, for instance, is going all-in on Material You (obviously), and they’ve already updated a number of their own apps to incorporate dynamic colors.

Since “monet” isn’t fully open source yet, we likely won’t be seeing other OEMs incorporate wallpaper-based theming in their forks of Android 12, unless they decide to create their own implementation. Custom ROM developers, meanwhile, can implement this open-source implementation of “monet”. Third-party app developers are free to add support for dynamic colors right now, even if it’ll only work on Pixel phones running the latest release or custom ROMs.

Material You doesn’t end at dynamic colors. Android 12 also redesigns the notifications panel UI, simplifies the power menu, tweaks the layout for the lockscreen, and makes several other UI changes. Google is also modernizing the Android widget and pushing developers to update their widgets for the new release. The company has already rolled out a number of updates that bring updated widget designs, many of which are beautiful to look at.

Scrolling Screenshots

Android 12 finally adds a highly requested feature: scrolling screenshots. With this feature, you can take a screenshot of a page that scrolls, without needing to take and then combine multiple screenshots. Because of the way it was built, Android’s native scrolling screenshots feature won’t work in every application, but it should work most of the time.