Eshu Marneedi

Allison Johnson, reporting for The Verge:

Google just announced a bold new look for Android, for real this time. After a false start last week when someone accidentally published a blog post too early (oh, Google!), the company is formally announcing the design language known as Material Three Expressive. It takes the colorful, customizable Material You introduced with Android 12 in an even more youthful direction, full of springy animations, bold fonts, and vibrant color absolutely everywhere. It’ll be available in an update to the Android 16 beta later this month…

But the splashy new design language is the update’s centerpiece. App designers have new icon shapes, type styles, and color palettes at their disposal. Animations are designed to feel more “springy,” with haptics to underline your actions when you swipe a notification out of existence.

The new design, frankly, is gorgeous. Don’t get me wrong: I like minimalist, simple user interfaces, but the beautiful burst of color, large buttons, and rounded shapes throughout the new operating system look distinctive and so uniquely Google. Gone are the days of Google design looking dated and boring — think Google Docs or Gmail, which both look at least six years past their prime — and I’m excited Google has decided to usher in a new, bold, exciting design era for the world’s most-used operating system.

But that’s where the plan begins to fall apart. Most Android apps flat-out refuse to support Google’s new design standards whenever they come out. It’s somewhat the same situation on iOS, where major developers like Uber, Meta, or even Google itself fail to support the native iOS design paradigms, but iOS has a much more vibrant app scene, and opinionated developers try to use the native OS design. Examples include Notion, Craft, Fantastical, and ChatGPT, all of which are styled just like any Apple-made app. When the new Apple OS redesign comes this fall, I expect all of those apps will be updated on Day 1 to support the new look. The same can’t be said for Android apps, which often diverge significantly from the “stock Android” design.

I put “stock Android” in quotes because this really isn’t stock Android. The base open-source version of the operating system is un-styled and isn’t pleasant to use. This is the Google version of Android, but because Google makes Android, people refer to this as the original, “vanilla” Android. Other smartphone manufacturers like Samsung wrap Android with their own software skin, like One UI, which I find unspeakably abhorrent. Everything about One UI disgusts me. It lacks taste and character in every way the “stock Android” of 10 years ago did. When Samsung inevitably updates One UI in a year (or probably longer) to support the new features, it’ll probably ditch half of the new styling and replace it with whatever Samsung thinks looks nice.

This is why Android apps rarely support the Google design ethos — because they must look good on every Android device, whether it’s by Google, Nothing, Samsung, or whoever else. That’s a shame because it defeats the point of such a wonderful redesign like Material 3 Expressive, which in part was created to unify the design throughout the OS. All of Google’s images from the “Android Show” keynote Tuesday morning showed every app carrying the same accent and background colors, button shapes, and other interface elements, but that’s hardly realistic. Thanks to Android hardware makers like Samsung, Android has always felt like a convention of independent software where every booth looks different as opposed to a cohesive OS.

Speaking of Samsung, this comment from David Imel, a host of the “Waveform Podcast,” stuck out to me:

You always have to wonder what behind-the-scenes deals had to have happened for Google to use the S24/S25 Ultra as the presentation device in all its keynotes for the last year.

I don’t know if they’re deals as much as it’s Google proving its competitiveness. I asked basically the same question and most of my replies basically came down to, “The Google Pixel isn’t a popular device and Google wants to showcase other Android phones as a means to embrace the competition.” It really is a shame Google is under so much regulatory scrutiny (thanks to its own doing), though, because the Pixel is the best Android phone in my book, and it ought to be displayed in all of Google’s keynotes. The most direct competition to the iPhone, I feel, is not any of Samsung’s high-end flagships, but the Google Pixel line because Pixels bridge hardware and software just like iPhones. Gemini runs best on Google Tensor processors, and the interface isn’t cluttered and messed up by One UI. Johnson says the Android redesign is meant to attract teenagers, and the best device for that in the Android world is the Pixel. It operates just like the iPhone.

When Samsung and Google do work together, they make amazing products. Here’s Victoria Song, also for The Verge:

After a few years of iterative updates, Wear OS 6 is shaping up to be a significant leap forward. For starters, Gemini will replace Google Assistant on the wrist alongside a big Material 3 Expressive redesign that takes advantage of circular watch faces…

Williams says that adding Gemini is more than just replacing Assistant, which is already available on many Wear OS watches. Like most generative AI, one of the benefits is better natural language interactions, meaning you won’t have to speak your commands just so. Gemini in Wear OS will also interact with other apps. For example, you can ask about restaurant reservations, and Gemini will reference your Gmail for that information. Williams also says it’ll understand more complex queries, like summarizing information. You can also still use complications, the app launcher, a button shortcut or say “Hey Google” to access Gemini.

Wear OS these days is a joint venture between Samsung and Google, and thus, doesn’t have the same design disparity as Android. Nearly all Wear OS devices with Google Assistant will receive Gemini support, and all Wear OS 6 watches will get Material 3 Expressive (terrible name), regardless of who they’re made by. This shoves the knife deeper into Apple’s back — the Apple Watch isn’t even planned to receive the “more personalized Siri,” supposedly coming “later this year”¹ while Google’s smartwatches all can use one of the best large language models in the world. I don’t even think there’s a ChatGPT app on the Apple Watch. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the Apple Watch is the best smartwatch on the planet by a long shot, but add this to the pile of artificial intelligence features Apple has to get started on.