Good interface design — the kind that’s simultaneously intuitive, beautiful, responsive, and powerful — is just so deceptively tricky to get right. Sure, it’s easy to complain about all the things we might not like about one particular UI, but there’s a big difference between being able to express some criticism and building something that everyone’s going to like.
Right now, Android’s going through some changes, and we continue to see Google push its software in a new direction with the embrace of its Material 3 Expressive aesthetic. That new look’s been making its presence felt across Android apps for months now, and when we polled you for your opinions on it last month, the majority of you were big fans.
Of course, just because a lot of people feel one way doesn’t necessarily mean that the feelings of those in the other camp are invalid, and those of you who aren’t fully on board with Google’s latest design directives clearly have more to say. A few weeks back we were lamenting the loss of some of our favorite Pixel features from over the years and noticed a whole lot of you joining in down in the comments there to commiserate. And more recently, we found ourselves coming to terms with some of those messy M3E feelings and similarly found a lot of complicated opinions from our commenters.
In case you haven’t been following along, we wanted to highlight some of our favorite responses that reveal this cloud of resentment that’s hanging over some of Google’s recent decisions.
One of the clearest statements of those frustrations comes from reader carsonmathre, who complains that Android has changed from a neat, consistent UI to something else entirely:
This whole UI looks like a caricature of what it used to be. Comic sans looking fonts right next to sharp ones, wobbly notification swipe animations, and while we’re talking about it the whole notification bar looks horrible now with all the app colors and everything where it used to be monochrome matched to my theme. I miss my (mostly) sleek UI; now my phone is trying to be goofy and playful in all the wrong places, and I don’t have any say in the matter.
That’s a sentiment largely shared by rezervny:
I’m shocked how so many people nowadays lack elementary aesthetical sense. New update is not a clean, aesthetically pleasant UX.
The new font is like a comic sans clone and too bold, icons are also too bold & too rounded – in general it feels as “childification” of UX. It looks a little bit as a cartoon.
That said, it’s not a complete wash, with rezervny adding:
To not be completely negative, resizable quick tiles + bolder colours are those few things which are a good change though.
Some of you are open to the idea of these Expressive changes, if only they didn’t arrive alongside functional downgrades, like kristofferkortsen here:
While it looks fresh and is mostly a positive, it doesn’t show both my SIM cards in the top bar anymore! I can’t see immediately which SIM is being used, so it’s a downgrade for me.
Making things look new but sacrificing functionality is not an upgrade!
Are those of us in the media to blame for some of your negative reactions because we’ve oversold Material 3 Expressive? Reader starbogt thinks so:
I feel like it’s gone back in time with the fonts 🤣 and very underwhelming after all the hype from media saying it’s the update we should have had in 16 originally!
A recurring theme seems to be how juvenile everything looks, as simon.williams points out:
I used to be able to pick my colour palette for the underlying system, now I can’t.
The power, WiFi and network icons now look like they have been drawn by someone with a sharpie.
Android may never offer the perfect UI for everyone, or even sufficient customization options for us to all feel like we’re in charge of the experience — and that’s fine. Today’s UI may not be your cup of tea, but Google is anything but a company to get locked in on one specific look, and we would not be surprised to see Android in 2030 tapping into a very different design language.
For now, we’ll just keep rolling with the punches and sharing all its latest changes with you — and we very much expect to keep hearing your feedback down in the comments!
