Android Is Getting Weird Again as iOS Gets More Boring

The best word to describe Google’s self-leaked Android UI is “funky.” According to a now-removed blog post, Android is getting a visual refresh in the form of a “Material 3 Expressive” design language, a bold, a little brash, and very in-your-face design with its odd shapes and massive fonts. Love it or hate it, at the very least we may finally experience a stint where Google and Apple’s smartphone interfaces aren’t carbon copies of each other.

The folks at 9to5Google first spotted a blog post from Google published ahead of its annual Google I/O conference detailing the new Material 3 Expressive redesign. The Wayback Machine still has the text and header video, but the blog managed to grab shots of this new UI before Google pulled it down. Google describes this look as “the most-researched update to Google’s design system, ever” and further claims it will make it up to four times faster to spot key UI elements.

You can be the judge of whether larger bubbles with bold text make it easier to navigate your phone. Otherwise, Google implies this redesign across the Android user experience is meant to “connect with people on an emotional level.” That includes using various colors and shapes to highlight important buttons or UI elements, rather than the “boring” lists you’ve come to expect from most baseline Android apps. “Cool” is the name of the game here. Google even included charts that showed that Material 3 Expressive enhanced the “coolness” of an app.

Those “cool” features include a pill-shaped “floating toolbar” that you can find at the bottom of several apps. Google claimed its research found that stressing size and contrast made the UI easier to use for most people, especially younger folk. Google even threw shade at Apple: “We found that well-applied expressive design is strongly preferred by people of all ages over non-expressive design that followed the iOS Human Interface Guidelines.”

Speaking of iOS, Apple is reportedly running in the opposite direction of Google with its upcoming iOS 19. Recent reports from reliable leakers at Bloomberg suggest Apple is trying to unify its interfaces across its iPhone, iPad, and Mac products. This would include adding circular, bubble-shaped app icons—much like the look of the Vision Pro’s “spatial” interface. We’re still waiting to see if Apple will finally unveil more of its long-promised Apple Intelligence features. The company reportedly went through a major restructuring period after internal tests proved the promised AI-ified Siri wasn’t up to snuff.

I can’t say I prefer the new Android design language. Those screenshots displayed on the now-deleted Google blog—especially the image for “Your Mix”—look more like poster advertisements than a clean UI where I can actually select what I want. The clock, payments, and wallet apps look a little easier to parse, but that’s because they need to display the most important information—the time and your account balance—front and center. The leaked screenshots show off the traditional keyboard in Gmail compared to a redesigned interface with the “send” button front and center, though it takes up nearly half the phone’s screen.

There are other signs Google will copy Apple in other ways. Android Authority recently reported that there’s code in Google’s upcoming Android 16 for resizable and modular Quick Setting tiles, very much like what Apple added to iOS 18’s modular Control Center. Now that everybody has a smartphone and the software has matured, it’s now normal to expect Android will copy iOS, and that Apple will return the favor in kind during every year’s OS update cycle. But Android is going all-in on aesthetics with its upcoming release. Whether or not that actually makes it more usable is another matter entirely.