Has Google’s Android UI overhaul caught on?

Android updates aren’t as exciting as they once were, but if you’re patient, there’s still some fun to be had. Google began the process of overhauling the Android UI with Material You in Android 12, and the process sequel in Android 13. As with so many changes over the years, Material You will only reach its full potential with developer buy-in – this has long been Google’s Achilles heel. There’s reason to be optimistic about Material You, but it’s too early to call it a success. Some puzzle pieces are still missing and they may never fall into place as Google envisions.

There were immediately enough reasons to be skeptical about the success of Material You. Google has rolled out Android 12 on the Pixels with good but not great first-party support. Most of Google’s apps supported the basic theme options, but some laggards took a few months to catch up.

Third party support was non existent but that was all on Google too. Android 12 didn’t officially support most of the Material You features for third-party developers, and Google hasn’t even made its Monet color picker engine available to OEMs. So some Android 12 phones didn’t even have Material You, and the ones that did had questionable and limited color options. Samsung was one of the few OEMs to make any effort to adopt Material You, but it only supported its own first-party apps and not Google apps. Well, that was a mess. With Android 13, Google has finally opened Material You in a meaningful way, and Samsung is even pulling along with Google as it prepares to launch One user interface 5 with extensive material to support you.

With most device makers still weeks or months away from the launch of Android 13, we can only speculate on how fully they’ll support Material You, but it sure looks like it’s going to be better than last year. Android 13 has the Material You styles in AOSP. We should see more take on Material You as Android 13 expands. So far, Samsung has shown us what happens when you increase saturation, but other OEMs can give Material You their own spin – there’s no requirement in the Android 13 CDD that they should imitate Google anyway.

Now that we’re a few weeks away from the debut of Android 13, some app developers are starting to take notice, and these may not be the ones you’d expect. For example, Spotify has already updated its app to support icon themes. Color is an important element of most brands and Spotify’s identity is strongly associated with the nuclear green icon, so it is surprising to see it up front with Material You support. The app even has a Material You widget!

The early selection of apps with support for Material You icons runs the gamut. There are financial apps like AmEx; communication tools such as Slack and Telegram; ESPN for sports news; and social apps like Reddit and the popular third-party client Sync for Reddit. Dropbox, another brand that relies heavily on its signature color, has also added a material icon. WhatsApp, so popular outside the US, also has icon support. However, the rest of the Meta portfolio, including Facebook and Instagram, is leading the way by pretending that Material You doesn’t exist. The same goes for many other top apps like Snapchat and Netflix. Until these very popular apps come on board, activating icon themes will make the average home screen look like a patchwork quilt.

It’s easy to forget with all the focus on home screen features and system accents, but Material You aims to unify the way apps look as well. The same color palette that controls your icons and buttons should ideally flow into the apps themselves. All developers need to do for icon support is add a monochrome asset for Android to apply themes, and that’s as far as most go now. The same goes for widgets — almost no apps have adopted Google’s new style outside of Gmail, Keep, YouTube Music, and other bundled apps.

Supporting Materials You need more work in an app, and Google will likely have limited success here. Many of the aforementioned apps that have offered a hint of Material You support, such as Slack, Telegram, and Dropbox, have only gone as far as adding an icon. Sync for Reddit is one of the few that actually changes the UX based on your system theme, but this is an app that constantly tries to keep up with the latest Android standards. Most app developers, especially those who work for large companies, can’t make the interface happen overnight (or possibly someday). Material You should never get into app interfaces in any significant way. Third-party developers had the tools to use Holo and Material Design in previous versions of Android, and generally they didn’t. Seeing an app use Material You accents will be a pleasant surprise, not the default.

You can’t blame developers for not immediately taking the opportunity to add Material You support – Google seems to be struggling to really stick to its own design guidelines. While the company’s various development teams have managed to update most of its popular apps with extensive Material You support, there are odd gaps.

Example: Google just released its first smartwatch after eight years of toil on Wear OS – a different story altogether – but the Pixel watch has its own phone app separate from the default Wear OS app. While Wear OS got at least rudimentary support for the Material You icon, the Pixel Watch app didn’t. It just sits there on my home screen, mocking me with its unmatched app icon. The app itself isn’t tied to the current material aesthetics either – it’s more like the Pixel Watch’s UI, which has its charm I suppose. Although, why am I manually changing the material accent colors on the dials in the first place? Google missed a huge opportunity to connect the app’s dial accents and UI with Material You on the phone. It was there, Google!

I really hope developers keep expanding Material You even if the adoption isn’t complete. This is a completely subjective aesthetic judgment, and you don’t have to agree with me, but Material You is the best Android has ever seen. I know a lot of people really love the pre-MY Android 11 theme, but many used to say the same thing about KitKat back in the Material 1.0 days. Material You, as implemented in Android 13, is a much-needed breath of fresh air for smartphones. When an app supports Material You themes across the board — from icons to widgets to UI — it’s a delightful experience that gives Android the cohesiveness it’s always lacked. Unfortunately, it’s also rare and it’s up to Google to fix that.