Well, the leaks were right. Google is updating the look of Android and Wear OS to make its mobile and wearable operating systems more visually expressive and animated.
Google has dubbed its new design system Material 3 Expressive, and plans to introduce it when Android 16 and Wear OS 6 launch later this year. Material 3 Expressive builds on the Material You design changes Google made with the introduction of Android 12 by adding “more natural, springy animations,” a greater sense of depth, updated “dynamic color themes” and “emphasized typography.” If you’re familiar with Apple’s approach to animation in iOS, Google seems to be using a similar philosophy here, making software elements more reactive to each other and your input, and layering in haptics so you can feel them react, too.
The company specifically calls out the way other notifications bounce and jiggle when you pull one out of a stack in the notification shade and the haptics you feel dismissing apps in the recent apps menu, but new animations should be noticeable throughout Android 16. That’s along with what looks like an even more playful use of typography and color theming in Google’s stock apps, and a tasteful blur in the background of contextual menus. For even more personalization options, Google says the Quick Settings menu can now be customized to fit more actions, not unlike iOS 18’s Control Center. On the lock screen, apps will also have the option to display a live-updating notification, a feature Google calls “Live Updates” that is equivalent to Live Activities in iOS.
Given the smaller screen real estate, Material 3 Expressive comes across as less of a major change on Wear OS, but there are still visual changes that should be noticeable once you update. That includes new animations when you scroll through lists and glances, dynamic color-theming that matches the rest of your watch to your watch face and tweaks to notifications that make them easier to interact with. That’s on top of performance improvements that are supposed to give Wear OS 6 smartwatches up to 10 percent more battery life, according to Google.
Material 3 Expressive adds more of the quirky pizazz that has made the company’s software stand out in the last few years, but Google claims these changes are backed up by research, too. Material 3 Expressive is “the most researched update to Google’s design system, ever,” according to the company. There’s a blog digging into some of Google’s findings, but of particular note is the idea that Material 3 Expressive apps are attractive to young people — the company claims up to 87 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds prefer expressive design — while being easier to understand for people over the age of 45.
It remains to be seen whether developers take these changes in stride, but at the very least Android 16 and Wear OS 6 will be more visually exciting than anything Google’s released in years.
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