neushimo

On a Sunday night before work the next morning, I was genuinely losing my mind trying to figure out why Google Chrome and some Google apps like Gmail and Google Files suddenly looked… wrong. Everything had this weird reddish tint in both light mode and dark mode. At first, I thought it was just the theme I applied to Chrome on my desktop. Then I blamed my phone’s blue light filter and convinced myself it would magically disappear by morning.

It did not.

And honestly, the part of me that gets bothered by tiny UI changes just could not ignore it for another day.

I use a Xiaomi phone running HyperOS, and while Xiaomi lets you adjust screen colors and display settings, there is no obvious setting that directly controls the strange color tinting inside certain Google apps.

After a lot of searching through forums, Reddit posts, and going back and forth with AI trying random fixes, I finally found the actual solution.

How to Fix the Weird Reddish Tint in Google Apps

The easiest fix is surprisingly simple.

Change your wallpaper to something bright or mostly white, or temporarily switch back to your phone’s default wallpaper and system theme.

On most Android phones, you can do this by:

• Long pressing an empty area on your home screen
• Opening Wallpapers or Themes
• Reverting to the default theme or wallpaper

Then after changing it:

• Restart your phone
• Open Google Chrome, Gmail, or Google Files again
• Check if the strange reddish tint is gone

For me, this immediately restored the normal Google app colors.

You can switch back to your custom wallpaper afterward, but sometimes Google may eventually reapply the color tint again after another restart or theme refresh.

Why Does It Do This?

This happens because of Google’s Material You system, also known as Material Design 3, which was introduced in Android 12.

Material You automatically extracts colors from your wallpaper and uses them across supported apps, menus, icons, widgets, and system elements. The idea is to make your phone feel more personalized and visually connected.

In theory, it sounds cool.

In practice, it turns your apps into a strange ugly color tones for absolutely no reason.

Samsung phones actually made this easier to manage because One UI includes a setting called Color Palette, which lets you disable the wallpaper-based theming entirely.

Unfortunately, Xiaomi HyperOS and some other Android brands do not always give you a clean option to turn this feature off completely.

That means your wallpaper can directly affect how apps like Chrome, Gmail, and Google Files look on your device.

My Experience and Wallpaper

What confused me the most is that my wallpaper was not even red.

I was using a wallpaper of a white astronaut standing on the moon with mostly black colors across the image. Somehow, Google still decided that my apps needed a reddish tint anyway.

Maybe the system cached old wallpaper colors while I was experimenting with different backgrounds earlier. I honestly still do not know.

But the result looked awful.

Final Thoughts

I get what Google is trying to do with Material You, but right now it still feels experiment, inconsistent, and overly aggressive, especially on phones where you cannot fully disable it.

Instead of making apps feel personalized, it sometimes just makes them look off.

If you are using a Xiaomi phone with HyperOS or another Android phone where Google Chrome suddenly has a weird reddish tint, changing your wallpaper back to a lighter or default one is probably the quickest fix.

Hopefully future Android updates give users a proper toggle to completely disable dynamic app coloring without needing workaround fixes like this.

And if you also experienced this weird Google Chrome tint issue, comment down your experience below and if you’ve find other ways to fix this issue.