Android Gets a Huge Design Refresh With Material 3 Expressive, First on Pixel Phones

A little over a week ago, someone on Google’s design team accidentally posted the details of their new design language, called Material 3 Expressive. This morning, as a part of “The Android Show,” Google made it publicly official and shared how Android is about to change on your phone from the UI to apps and interactions. They are calling this “one of our biggest updates in years” for design.

To be clear, this is a new design refresh for both Android and Wear OS, and you can read about the Wear OS changes at this post. For this one, we’re focusing on what’s changing for your Android phone, starting with Google’s Pixel line, which is about to see the first taste around the end of May, likely with the stable launch of Android 16. A broader rollout will then happen later this year.

So there are several things about Material 3 Expressive that Google wants you to know about: animations and actions, dynamic colors and more customization, app design refreshes, and just an overall lightweight yet satisfying experience.

Google is suggesting that this Material 3 Expressive refresh will make Android feel more fluid with a system of “more natural, springy animations” that attempt to “bring a moment of delight to everyday routines.” That’s because the haptics will meet that moment, as will the finish of each animation. Think about how the haptics of your phone could subtly respond as you do something like drag a notification away or fling down the notification shade or adjust the volume with an upgraded slider. You are supposed to find this new mix of animation and response from your phone that might be memorable as you complete actions.

With this design upgrade, you’ll also find updated dynamic color themes, responsive components, and an emphasis on typography. All of that will help with newly customizable Quick Settings areas that have resizable actions (Flashlight or Do Not Disturb tiles). Google describes this next level of customization as “making sure that your important stuff doesn’t get buried in your notifications.” There will be blur to backgrounds to “provide a sense of depth” and to make motion feel “lightweight” without interrupting whatever is happening behind an action.

Google is also planning to update Google apps like Photos, Gmail, and Fitbit to meet the new UI of Android. In a briefing I had about this news, I’m pretty sure I recall seeing the dark theme for the Fitbit app too, so that’s still coming (since 2023) and so hopefully we see it arrive this year. You can see a preview of the app refreshes above.

And finally, Google talked about the Live Updates feature that is coming to Android 16, which we’ve seen from the first Android 16 beta. These are ongoing notifications you’ll find on the lock screen that show the status of something, like an Uber ride or Eats order, or some other navigation-type app. This is a feature that Samsung is trying out in One UI 7 and that Apple has done for a couple of years now.

Material 3 Expressive really does look like a big upgrade with more colors, more animations, more customization, and a refresh for apps to match. Since this is Google doing this and they like to show off new stuff on Pixel phones, the Pixel line will get this all first. We should see some of it by the end of May, but the big launch will happen “later this year.”

If you’d like to read more on why Google made the changes they did, their design blog has a deep dive (it’s the one that was published a week early).

// Google