For a year now, everyone has been putting "glass" in their interface. Most of the time, it's a blur with a white veil over it. Nice for two minutes, then you stop seeing it.
Sola 1.0.16 does the real thing. Your wallpaper shows through the glass and bends as it does, like behind a thick pane. And it keeps doing that as you move whatever sits on top of it.
Your wallpaper comes back to life
Place a widget on a beautiful photo: you see it through the glass, rippled by its thickness. Drag it, and the image scrolls behind it in real time. Nothing is frozen, nothing is faked.
Widgets even let the icons underneath them show through. Your screen gains depth instead of stacking up as opaque layers.
On widgets too, not just folders
A widget from another app arrives with an opaque background, and no launcher can normally see behind it. Sola strips that background away so the glass can take its place, without ever touching the photos or images the widget displays.
The result: your weather, calendar or music widgets finally blend into your screen instead of floating on top of it like bolted-on rectangles. A few widgets paint their backdrop inside an image rather than as a background — those stay opaque, and nothing can be done about it.
You choose where, surface by surface
Liquid Glass is an option, and it's off by default. You'll find it under Settings › Appearance › Liquid Glass.
A master switch, then the list of surfaces with a preview for each: home screen folders, widgets, dock, drawer folders, search bar, menus. Turn everything on, or just widgets, or everything except the dock. It's your screen.
And it stays fast
Sola's rule number one hasn't moved: nothing should stutter, ever. So the effect was pushed to its worst case, opening the app drawer with about fifteen glass surfaces moving together. Opening stays just as crisp as before, on a recent phone as well as a more modest one.
And when the effect is off, it costs nothing at all. It requires Android 13 or newer; below that, the setting stays greyed out and your screen doesn't change.
Two other additions
Remove a folder from the home screen without opening it. A long press on a home screen folder now offers to remove it. The folder isn't deleted, it stays in your drawer. And lifting your finger no longer opens the folder in passing, which was frankly annoying.
No more widgets stuck on "Loading…". Some widgets would fill in when placed, then fall back to a loading screen that never went away. That's fixed.
Also in this release
- A video wallpaper is now visible through the glass.
- A folder's custom color now tints the glass instead of hiding it.
- A test build of Sola no longer shows up in the drawer of the version installed from the Play Store.
How to get it
1.0.16 is rolling out through the Play Store. You can force a check from the Play Store app, under "Manage apps and device".
Open on Google Play