Easily change Accent colors on Samsung Windows Phone [Homebrew]

By Daniel Rubino
last updated

There's been successful attempts at modifying HTC Accent colors aka "themes" on unlocked developer devices, but up until now, Samsung phones were left to watch in envy.

Now Dave Amenta of Send to WP7 (Desktop) fame, has gone ahead and released a simple and effective app for Samsung phones that will allow you to easily modify all of your themes to any color you like. The beauty in it is you don't have to mess with those silly #FF339933 codes, but instead just use a color/shade slider. Easy as cake. But yes, your device needs to be developer-unlocked.

As you can see, we changed our Focus to a nice blue-grey theme and we feel pretty happy about it. Except now we want to go try every other color, so we're gonna go do that now, kthxbai!

Update: The app now works on LG and HTC devices too. See here.

Great work Dave (and thanks for the tip)! Read more on it here. Edit: Love black on white!

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.

9 Comments
  • MS should just add that damn custom color slider in the options with a update. I don't see why they would limit it to a set number of colors unless there's some screen related reasoning behind saving battery, but I doubt that. MS should be taking notes from all this homebrew and get an idea of what people want to see in WP7 and then do it. Then there won't be such a need to unlock/hack the OS.
  • Agreed. Seems like they could have a bunch of presets, like now and one just labeled "Custom" where upon tapping, it launches a similar slider, you choose your color and save. Done.I'm sure they'll do this at some point.
  • Can't login to Zuner servers so I can't run Chevron, but was able to somehow get the app on the phone. When I tried to run, said Microsoft had disabled the app and recommended I uninstall. How is everyone keeping their phones unlocked?
  • Yeah, that's a huge PITA. So much so, this how is I solved it: I gave Microsoft $99 for developer unlocked status. Much easier. Then again, I write on this stuff so I can be reimbursed, you can't so that's a hella investment for you. There is a hack at XDA for this but only for HTC at the moment.
  • This is just a 'no brainer'. If there was anything 'Windows' that Microsoft should have implemented with WP7 is the ability to change the color of the tiles (themes). I still think a transparent 'color'option for the tiles with a custom wallpaper would look would pretty good. I just don't think that Microsoft needs to be taking baby steps when implementing features, especially something like this which is simply a cosmetic addition.
  • Black on white is beautiful!!! Can you do a semi light grey on black too, not so light as you can't see the text though. WOuld love to see what this looks like
  • The background cannot be changed as of now--just black or white.
  • Is that 'Voice to Text' I see on the Focus? How in the world did you get that?
  • http://wpcentral.com/lg-s-voice-text-app-gets-hacked-all-windows-phones