Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google’s been working to modernize the Play Store’s interface, recently giving it a new gradient-shaded status bar.
- The app’s also working on a couple more Expressive updates, including a new loading indicator.
- Card UI may also be updated to move text away from graphics.
Material 3 Expressive finally landed in full force last month, and based on your feedback, the changes it implements are well appreciated. But as we’ve seen this past summer, Expressive revamps to existing Android apps haven’t been hitting all at once, and Google continues to whittle away at them. Right now we’ve spotted some new tweaks to one of the company’s apps, and some hints at what could be changing next.
We are looking at the Play Store itself today, and Google’s version 48.4.38-31 release in particular. Most of the stuff we’ve uncovered isn’t yet publicly accessible, and only shows work-in-progress changes that may or may not ever see the light of day. But we will get started with one that you can actually appreciate right now:
This one might slip past you without noticing, but the Play Store has recently started shading the status bar with a gradient when scrolling down the screens for app or game listings. That’s a look Google’s slowly been embracing across its Android apps, like we already saw with the main Google app.
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As for upcoming changes, these are also a little minor, but we’ve identified two in particular that have caught our eye. First up, we’ve got a new look for how the Play Store displays the cards that you’ll find above clusters. Right now, the Play Store integrates text right into the graphics of these, as you can see in the first two examples below:
With the new look, as you can see in the final two screenshots there, the Play Store makes that text stand out a little more by tightening up the graphics and giving the label its own space. It’s not reinventing the wheel or anything, but does look a bit cleaner.
Finally, we’ve spotted a very Expressive loading icon pulsing its way through some screen transitions:
Like that status bar shading, this is another component of Material 3 Expressive we’re also well familiar with by now, and Google could be thinking about replacing the Play Store’s spinning-wheel load indicator with this pulsing, shape-changing Expressive version.
Same as the new card design, this one’s not yet live just yet, but Google could conceivably flip the switch on this at any point it likes. We may be getting close to the end of the road soon for these Material updates across Google apps, but we’ll continue to keep our eyes peeled for any more of these late-stage changes.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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