At Google I/O today, Google unveiled more about Android 12, and the biggest change is a complete visual overhaul of the operating system. It’s called Material You, and it’s radically different from what Android looks and feels like today. Every visual and animated aspect of the operating system seems to have been changed. Some examples:
Wallpaper-based theming — or “color extraction” as Google calls it — brings bold color combinations to every corner of the OS. It automatically decides which hues in your wallpaper are good for the dominant and complementary colors and applies them in all of Android’s screens, menus, and even first-party apps.
[…]Apple likely lit a fire under Google when it added widgets to iOS, and the Mountain View company has responded with a much-needed refresh of its first-party widget designs. Expect to see new clocks, new weather widgets, new shortcuts to oft-used contacts, and easier access to your favorite chats.
As well as a refresh of the static design elements, Material You will also breathe new life into animations. We’re going to get more fluid motion, better feedback, and generally much smoother performance. Google says that its work under the hood will reduce the CPU time taken up by core system services by up to 22%, which will be reflected in the user experience.
I think it definitely looks new and fresh, and less edgy and harsh than the current Material Design sometimes feels. Of course, everyone will hate these changes at first – as is tradition – but I’m very curious to see this in action on my own phone, and something like this is sure to get me to take a serious look at the next crop of Pixel phones as my possible next phone, just to get my hands on the new look and feel.
Aside from the massive visual overhaul, Google is also continuing its improvements on the privacy front, but Android being a Google product, I always feel a tad bit skeptical about this particular effort. We’ll see how long it will take for OEMs to actually ship Android 12 – and how badly they will butcher Material You – and as always, that wait may be long.
It’s very ’round’ / ’rounded’. Facebook really ruined rounded design for me.
I was happy with the interface in Android 4.2. The hard to make sense of Material design plus all the other junk just made my now old phone a pain to use and run slower. No phone home data snooping OS is to be trusted in any fundamental way. There’s also a forced obsolence issue with apps keeping up with Google’s dictats.
I now use my phone as just a phone. I rarely use anything else on it. It’s too sluggish and I survived without a smartphone before the age of the internet and social media and Web 2.0 and all that junk.
Android up to version 4.4 was the best mobile design. From then on it’s been getting worse with each release.
> before Web 2.0 and all that junk
Definitely agree! And slow too.
HollyB,
I try my darnedest to avoid products & services that trade privacy for convenience, but It’s definitely gotten much harder these days since the anti-features are everywhere. People, my relatives included, don’t even have the skills to make sense of a map. OSM-And offline maps are actually very good with street by street directions, but people have become such mindless zombies that they aren’t able to function without having google spoon feed them. Ugh this irks me.
I don’t like using my phone for complex tasks either because it’s so inefficient, but I’ll say it is handy when I’m on the go away from a desktop.
As far as the web goes, IMHO it has gotten more consistent and better for development overall. Dealing with rendering quirks used to be awful and browsers were too limited, so much so that plugins like flash were necessary to do things that HTML could not back then. Of course we all managed to survive. There may be sentimental attachments to the past, but the old web is not something I’d really want to go back to.
So when two text messages are displayed on the lock screen, the corners that are touching on the messages morph from rounded to squared so make one big text box? That is stupid. I’m really not interested in a phone OS that animates every damn thing. Haven’t the people who are designing and/or approving this crap ever heard the phrase “less is more”? I have zero interest in watching a `performance` every time I want to do something, and my phone ui looking like a webui written in typescript & vue. I absolutely do not agree with Thom that this “definitely looks new and fresh”. Old & played out, yes. I do agree however that I will “hate these changes at first” — and every day moving forward.
I’m sure lot of conceptual work went into it (and probably it uses some advanced AI behind the scenes) but from the examples the design is not for everyone. On the first sight it looks like UI for some baby/maternity products. The color combinations are overwhelmingly pastel which (at least for me) is sickening. I hope they treat it as a base and evolve from that allowing more customization than just color.
Nooooooo…
I want a user interface that has clearly defined buttons and states.
I want a user interface that has NO possible chance of moving or shifting or changing just as I’m about to touch the screen.
I’m sure I’ll get used to the new user interface but, is there like a hidden “mid-90s” setting I can enable…? 😛
Oh yes please, give us a proper UI designed by HCI experts. I’m so sick of these awful “user experiences” designed by first year graphic design students who don’t understand anything about human-computer interaction.
Ok grandpa, here’s a teletype…
It was probably your justified comment questioning if it’s necessary to push the gay/LGBT agenda in a 30 second clip about Android. A lot of people are hyper-sensitive these days and believe all comments relating to race, gender identity, sexual preference, etc. should be in full & complete unquestioned support of, otherwise they’re automatically offensive – no matter how absurd that is.
I’m hyper sensitive to the LGBT agenda being pushed everywhere. I don’t push my heterosexuality from all the orifices, I don’t fucking understand why they needed to show two gays in the video dedicated to the new release of Android. I would have fired the person who greenlit it.
There are less than 2% of people on this globe who belong to LGBT, yet it sometimes feels like we have at the very least 50% of those who associate themselves with this trait.
I’m pretty sure it’s a requirement now that all things contain a gay, transsexual, pan-sexual, a black, and a biological woman. And if it doesn’t, you’re required to be upset and filled with fake-outrage.
@birdie
I’m sorry but in the UK if you behaved like this you would be subject to a lawsuit and lose. The law is extremely clear on beliefs versus discrimination. You can have any bigoted idea you like between the confines of your own skull but if you go broadcasting it or harassing people because of it or act upon it you will find yourself in very hot water.
I’m not going to go on a long tirade about visibility but just because people struggling to get the same rights you take for granted have to make a song and dance about it simply to get their foot in the door should give you pause for thought in your cisgenhet bubble. As for the percentage of people identifyin as LGBT it’s significantly higher than 2% and can vary higher than 10% if you count everyone on the spectrum. The science of sexuality preference is a bit more complicated than this for example: men tend more towards heteronormity than women who generally have a strong preference but more open to a releationship either way. It’s not the only book on the topic and there may be better depending on what you are interested in but for further reading I suggest “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” is the place to begin.
Speaking for myself there are times when I wish everyone would calm down and there weren’t bunfights or peope shoehorned in but it’s a learning curve. The world is changing and it can take a while for people to adjust and find ways to fit in and polices and practices to catch up and emotional responses to normalise hence this thing called understanding and tolerance.
Next time please do inform yourself about a topic before opening your gob.
@HollyB
Birdie doesn’t strike me as a bigot at all, just someone who doesn’t appreciate other peoples priorities being crammed down his throat and scolded for not making them his own. Further, why should his “cisgenhet bubble” be any less valid than someone else’s `non-cisgenhet bubble`? Why would you expect “tolerance” from a person you disparage for not sharing your views? Nobody should think they have any authority as the morality or thought police. With all the unsolicited “advice” you gave Birdie, perhaps the best advice you could be given is to simply not give a shit what he thinks. There’s nothing wrong with him not championing the LGBT cause or feeling overwhelmed by it being shoehorned into everything. If you’re not a broccoli eater, you would probably get tired of it being served with every meal you eat.
What’s worse, a person who doesn’t agree with you, or insisting they should?
I’ve had a look at the new design and oh dear. Not a fan of the overlarge lock screen. I prefer time being displayed as a horizinal not split vertically. I loath rounded corners and not a fan of “wallpaper based theming”. I like my colours to be stable. Colours are always difficult. I have no problem with pastel colours for some items of clothing or bathroom acessories and beauty products but on a phone user interface?
I’m sure there’s psychological and marketing reasons which motivated this design effort. Some will be staff justifying their jobs. Others will be to sell new product. I just cannot get emotionally involved with a phone. It’s a tool and I don;’t want to spend more time with it then than necessary. There’s also classic design versus fashion. Bling versus something tasteful. Boutique versus mass produced. It all gets a bit much. In an ideal world if I bought a new phone I’d want it to be designed along classic design principles and last for years. I don’t want to keep buying a new one or continuously relearning how to use it. As for its looks there is the form and function which dictates a lot about it. Aside from this something more than a slab would be nice but I’m not paying over the odds for it.
Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m complaining to much. If it’s functional and stable and we’ve reached a baseline where phones can last (decades preferably) I’m fine with this. Pastel shades are a change from black with everything. If phone looks can evolve beyond a minimalist slab so they have some personality as an accessory that would be nice too.
Like a lot of people on here, i do not like the direction the UI is going in. Whenever i install a UI with a GUI, the first thing i do is turn of all animations and other things like that, But i think people with this mindset is a small percentage of the market. My wife is very smart, and is definitely a phone “power user”. In the end , she chose an iPhone over an Android phone, because she thought the phone physically and UI was much better looking. For her uses, there really was not much difference in functionality, so she went with the more attractive option. and there is nothing wrong with that. But that is who these newer UIs are trying to appeal to, because, understandably, that’s what gets them the most sales. Hopefully, there will be options to shut all the glitz and glitter off for users like me.
Yup.
Don’t make the animations faster, make the OS so fast that animations to hide lag are unnecessary in the first place.
It’d be nice if they stopped the trend of wasting more and more screen real estate on blank space and randomly curved borders etc too. We literally pay by the inch in screen real estate with phones – please let us use it.
I’m happy with a phone which reaches a good baseline. Once everything hits a certain point it’s good enough for most uses which is the point desktops and laptops passed a few years ago. Beyond this I like stability like a washing machine, or television, or car. Aesthetics are a factor of course but I’m not made of money.
Back in the day it was power shoulders and Olympus OM 10 and Porsche 911 and Filofax and nouvelle cuisine. I guess i have just got old.