Google is fixing a big readability complaint with this new Android setting

The team at Android Authority is a big fan of Android’s new Material 3 Expressive redesign, and it seems we’re not alone. According to our recent poll, nearly 63% of you love it too, while most of the remaining 37% find it acceptable. For the small fraction of our readers who dislike the new design, the primary complaint is readability. Material 3 Expressive makes copious use of background blur effects, which, while visually appealing, comes at the cost of text visibility.

Although this may not affect most people, the reduced contrast poses an accessibility challenge for some users. To address this, Google plans to roll out a new Android setting that reduces these background blur effects. Last month, Mindy Brooks, Google’s VP of Product Management and User Experiences on the Android Platform, told me this new setting is coming in the “near future,” but she didn’t provide a specific release date.

While digging through the latest Android Canary 2509 release, I spotted a new “reduce blur effects” toggle under Settings > Accessibility > Color & motion. According to its description, this setting “make[s] backgrounds and panels easier to see” when enabled.

From what I can tell, enabling this toggle effectively disables background blur everywhere, from the Quick Settings panel and notification shade to the lock screen, app drawer, and recent apps menu.

The new toggle replicates the functionality of the old “allow window-level blurs” setting in Developer Options, which has been removed in this Canary release. Thus, the new setting doesn’t add new functionality, but it makes it much easier for regular users to disable background blur.

Even though this setting is live in the Android Canary channel, it’s not clear when it will roll out to the Stable or Beta channels. I spotted code for this setting in the Android 16 QPR2 Beta 2 release and was able to manually enable it, but it’s uncertain if Google plans to bring this toggle to the stable version of Android 16 QPR2 in December. We’ll have to wait for the upcoming Android 16 QPR2 Beta 3 release to find out.