There is a button on our template page that stays locked until you choose a colour. You cannot create your app without picking one. People occasionally find this annoying for about four seconds, and we kept it anyway. Here is the thinking.
The flat-pack effect
People value things more when they had a hand in making them. Furniture researchers noticed it with self-assembled bookshelves; anyone who has burnt a pancake for a child has noticed it at breakfast. The effort does not need to be large. It needs to be yours.
Choosing a colour is the smallest real act of making. The moment the preview repaints in your claret instead of our monochrome, something shifts: you stop evaluating our app and start inspecting yours. That shift is worth more than any feature we could add to the sheet.
A colour is not one colour
Here is the nerdy bit, kept short. When you pick “ocean”, almost nothing on screen becomes that exact blue. What changes is a whole family: the ink the text is written in, the paper behind it, the hairlines between sections, the fill of quiet buttons, the little badge that marks an unread thing. Dark mode gets its own family, tuned so text stays readable rather than mechanically inverted.
Cheap theming swaps one accent colour and calls it a day, which is why cheaply themed apps all look like the same app wearing different lipstick. Doing it properly means re-mixing the whole palette, and doing it safely means checking the contrast maths so no choice you make can ever produce grey text on grey.
Change your mind later, free
The colour you pick is a starting point, not a tattoo. Ask in chat and your app changes clothes. But you will have picked the first one yourself, before the app ever existed, and our bet is that this tiny act is why it ends up on your home screen instead of in a tab you forgot.
Go pick badly. It is reversible. Picking is the point.