Hey Apple, what’s up with these colors?

I use the Freeform app quite a lot for doodling on my iPad.^[1] It’s not a perfect app, but it works for my needs, those needs being “recapturing that childhood habit of idly doodling on grid paper”. However, I’ve noticed something that I now can’t un-notice.

There are five colors available in the Markup toolbar — red, yellow, green, blue, and black.

There’s also a color picker pop-over, which by default also has five swatch colors — again, red, yellow, green, blue, and black.

However, as the observant among you may have already noticed:

These are not the same colors.^[2]

Compare the toolbar colors (top) with the popover colors (bottom):

I initially thought this might be some mis-handling of color spaces, as Apple displays generally use Display P3 and a mis-conversion between sRGB and Display P3 felt plausible? But playing around with the colors I couldn’t get them to line up in a manner that might confirm that theory. If you’d like to poke around with it, the colors are as follows (as RGB triples in the P3 space):

color	toolbar	popover
red	232, 70, 74	235, 77, 61
yellow	247, 210, 84	247, 206, 70
green	121, 212, 117	100, 196, 102
blue	59, 124, 242	40, 95, 244
black	0, 0, 0	0, 0, 0