- Android is getting its biggest visual overhaul in years with the upcoming Material 3 design language.
- It will bring blur and transparency effects, a shift from rounded elements to a more practical, boxy aesthetic, and colorful icons in settings.
- Other UI tweaks include compact notifications and updated status bar icons.
Major Android updates have gotten pretty boring year over year. There’s rarely any exciting feature, mostly comprising under-the-hood changes that largely go unnoticed. Even the upcoming Android 16 update seems like a minor ordeal that barely anyone is excited about. However, Google has some big changes planned up its sleeves, which will give Android its biggest facelift in years thanks to Material 3.
Google recently confirmed that they will showcase their next version of the Material design language – Material 3, at their developer conference, or Android Show, sometime around May. But thanks to the folks at Android Authority, we already have an early glimpse of Android’s biggest redesign.
Android Material 3 Will Be All About Blur and Transparency
Starting with the notification shade. Here, you can take a look at the old and the new quick settings panel. No, this is not HyperOS or One UI. You are looking at stock Android. The Material 3 redesign adds a blurred semi-transparent background effect, giving a frosted glass appearance that looks quite modern.
Even the toggles and the brightness slider have been tweaked slightly, offering one tap on or off controls. As for the blurred effect, it is also visible in other aspects of the Android UI. You can see it when you go to the recent page from the Pixel launcher. It also comes up when opening the app drawer, or on the PIN or password area in the lock screen.
A Shift From the Bubbly Android Experience
With Android 12, all elements in Android received a more rounded pill-shaped makeover. Now with Material 3, Google is redesigning those elements, giving them a practical and slightly boxier appeal. Starting with the volume slider, you can see that it is more rectangular now and has a thin handle to guide you where to touch to change the volume.
The same appears when you expand the volume panel or go to your Android’s media output switcher. Even the settings page is getting a colorful makeover as part of Material 3 Expressive. As you can see in the screenshots below, all options in the settings page will now have colorful icons based on their category. This will make it easy to get to a particular type of setting in the app.
Each option within a setting will appear in its separate card, with a right-facing arrow to indicate that you can dive deeper into this option.
Other Subtle Changes in Material 3 Expressive
Besides these, we will get to see other minor quality of life changes coming to Android. First, on the lockscreen, the date and weather will now appear under the clock instead of sitting on the top left side. Notification icons will also show up as little icons that you can tap to expand and read them.
This is called compact view, and you can enable or disable it from Settings > Notifications > Notifications on lock screen. The PIN entry screen will feature bolder and bigger numbers for better visibility. Jumping into the homescreen, there are going to be five new icon shapes, including “square”, “four-sided cookie”, “seven-sided cookie”, “arch”, and “complex clover.”
If you take a close look at the status bar, you might notice that the icons have also been tweaked. Now the Wi-Fi and network icons have a segmented look, much like what you get on OneUI 7. The battery icon now lies horizontally and shows the current battery percentage inside the icon, and turns green when charging.
So these are all the new changes coming to Android with Material 3 Expressive. This looks like a big overhaul, even bigger than Material U in some departments. But I don’t think it will be showing up with Android 16. Android Authority enabled these options manually on Android 16 Beta 4, but there is still no confirmation as to when we could see these changes arrive.
Either Google will enable these elements later on with the QPR builds for Pixel devices, or make them available with Android 17. We’ll only find out at the upcoming Google I/O. So, stay tuned for that, and let us know what you think about the Material 3 changes in Android.
