We told you in our quick teardown of Google Allo 2.0 just a couple days ago that we found evidence that Google is preparing to add chat themes to its Allo messenger. Now we have actually managed to enable these themes on a rooted device and we’ve screenshotted them for you to check out before the app actually gets them…

If you have the latest version of Allo, you may have noticed that Google added a “Monochrome” theme option in the “General settings” menu. That option doesn’t make sense in the current version, because the monochrome mode isn’t really all that much different than the mostly-monochrome default theme. But that’s about to change, because you’re soon going to be able to pick from a variety of colorful themes for each of your chats.

As you can see below, these match up pretty well with the many theme names we discovered the other day. They range from “Moon” to “Sorbet” to “Clouds”. Please ignore my terribly hideous Allo selfie.

It seems that the app is going to suggest that you pick a theme every time you start a new conversation, and then you’ll be able to change it at any time from the same menu that houses other chat details like notifications and seeing a gallery of shared media.

Here’s what the theme picker and the chat settings menus look like:

The Google Allo 2.0 update is a pretty substantial one, but this is one of those features that look to be waiting for a Google server-side switch. Other than this, Allo 2.0 has app shortcuts that let you create a conversation by tapping and holding the icon from the home screen, Quick Reply for replying from an Allo notification, multi-window mode for using the app alongside another one in Android Nougat, and a new accessibility mode.

We still don’t know when chat themes will roll out in Allo, but stay tuned as we learn more.

So it seems monochrome in Allo 2 doesn’t serve much purpose yet, but you’re going to want to have that option when chat themes are added. — Stephen Hall (@hallstephenj) October 26, 2016

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: