Digital Wellbeing is looking easy on the eyes with its first taste of Material 3 Expressive

Google developers are currently in the middle of an Android-wide project to update the look and feel of the company’s apps, all with the goal of embracing the new Material 3 Expressive design language introduced earlier this year. Exactly how those updates are proceeding varies quite a bit between apps — some have their new UI already arriving, while others haven’t yet made their changes user-facing.  Today we’re checking out the latest addition to the former camp — that is, at least if you’re running the right version of Android.

Last month Google introduced a bold new option for Android fans who prioritize bleeding-edge feature access above silly things like system stability, with the introduction of a new public Canary track. And today we’re spotting that users running the latest Android Canary or Android 16 QPR1 Beta are getting access to an updated version of Digital Wellbeing.

We’re seeing the new look with version 1.30.785826879.beta of Digital Wellbeing, and while it’s definitely starting to hit users, right now Google’s implementation feels a little like a half measure.

Material 3 Expressive changes dominate the main Digital Wellbeing screen, following the same sort of design pattern we’ve seen across other apps: lots of rounded corners, dividers between entries in a list, and background coloring that contrasts with interactive elements.

Sadly, Expressive’s interest in color doesn’t carry over to your app activity chart, which drops its rainbow hues for a much more subtle set of tones. To be fair, the new look is arguably more successful, with its denser layout easier to read at a glance, but Google could have easily kept the fun colors, too.

What we haven’t seen yet is any of this M3E impact hitting the other screens you might encounter while using Digital Wellbeing, and so far the overhaul is confined to the primary view. There’s no rule that says that all of these changes have to arrive at once, though, and it’s entirely possible that Google will continue to deliver more UI tweaks ahead of this new look becoming available for users on stable Android builds.