Threads has been one of the most discussedsocial media appssince it officially launchedin July. Positioned to take on X (formerly Twitter), the Meta-owned platform has aggressively pushed the app’s development by adding new features, more recently seeing theintroductionand expansion of thekeyword search functionality. The X alternative/clone is now picking up one of our favorite visual features ofAndroid 13— a themed icon.
Since activating themed icons is left to the app developers' discretion, adoption has been slower than expected. But thelist continues to grow, and Threads by Instagram is the latest to enable it, 9to5Googlereports. We caught the new themed icon on the app’s latest beta version,v300.0.0.27.109. This particular version is currently available onAPKMirror, while the latest stable version available on the Play Store (v299.0.0.34.109) doesn’t appear to do the trick. We haven’t tried thePlay Store beta, however.
As you can see in the before and after comparison below, the change is quite evident and finally brings parity with X, which added themed icon support last December. Although the new themed icon is only available in the beta release right now, we suspect it wouldn’t take long to make it to the stable version of Threads.
Of course, there are ways to force themed icons on some of your apps if the developers haven’t done it on their own, thanks to apps likePinned ShortcutsandSmart Launcher. We caught an early glimpse of Google’s attempt to force themed icons,but the results weren’t too flattering. So this ultimately switches the responsibility back on to individual app developers to include app icon theming.
As for Threads, the service was born this year because of a vacuum created by the tumult at X following its 2022 acquisition by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the opportunity to cash in on the negative hype surrounding the platform and launched the Twitter alternative in July. It’s an open secret at this point that Threads is designed to offer an alternative platform for people who may be disillusioned by X and its slew of policy changes.
Given the introduction of newer, more familiar features in the recent past, it’s clear that Threads is here to stay, regardless of how it started. This was evidenced by the arrival of anew Following tabon the service, a feature borrowed directly from Twitter. Since it’s Meta, there were some obvious privacy concerns as well, not to mention the fact that deleting your Threads accountcould erase your linked Instagram account, too, which is quite odd. Thankfully, there are ways touse Threads without sacrificing your privacy, in addition to other useful tips that are worth learning before you dive in.
