Wondering what ‘Material NEXT’ could bring to Google apps

With the first Android 12 Developer Preview, a major redesign of the Settings app was discovered, pointing to a redesign of Google’s Material Design. Let’s take an exploratory look at how some of Google’s other Android apps might look like these next generation material design tips.

Based on alleged Google design mockups that leaked before Android 12 Developer Preview 1, the operating system update is about to bring a major redesign to Pixel phones and beyond. In a separate leak, it was said that this redesign is known as “Material NEXT”, suggesting a third generation of Material Design guidelines.

Although there were less surface level changes in Android 12 Developer Preview 1 than in leaks, our team was able to enable what appears to be a new design of the NEXT Material from the Settings app. Trademarks include a more affordable design similar to Samsung’s One UI, a redesigned search bar, thicker items in lists, and a design that responds to the theme colors across the system you choose.

With that serving as initial guidelines, we decided to try our hand at imagining how Google apps it could look with the next generation of material design. Throughout this post, you’ll see models which serve to visually demonstrate how Google it could redesign these applications. Remember that Material NEXT is still in development and each application is also subject to its own design choices.

Gmail

When Google first revealed the material theme as a step ahead of material design, Gmail was one of the first applications to receive a redesign of the “Google material theme”. Starting our models on the simpler side, Gmail doesn’t need a lot of design changes.

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Here, we simply replace the “rounded rectangle” search bar with the more pill-shaped bar seen in the Settings application. The biggest change in the search bar is that the Google Account avatar is significantly larger and now floats out of the search bar, making it easier to tap or slide.

Game store

The Play Store homepage was an equally perfect candidate for the revamped search bar. In fact, the Play Store is better prepared for this redesign of Material NEXT for the search bar than most other apps, as Google has previously experimented with abandoning the drawer menu. In this specific experimental redesign, the drawer options have been moved to the menu that opens when you touch your avatar.

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Meanwhile, other sections of the Play Store are the main ones for another important piece of the NEXT Material redesign. In the Settings application, each page receives a kind of banner that occupies approximately the top third of the screen, keeping the content of the page at your thumb’s reach. The banner decreases and increases smoothly based on the scroll. In the second Play Store mockup above, we applied this flexible banner design to the “My apps and games” page.

Adding another layer to the mix, we believe that Material NEXT is closely related to the leaked and recently demonstrated theme system of Android 12. When developers in the Android community were able to enable the theme system, colors were also used prominently in the Application Settings, including as a primary background color.

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For this mockup, we took the Google Contacts app, changed the search bar, added a banner in the top third, and added the standard bluish-white color seen in the Settings app today.

Google files

The last piece of Material NEXT that we can point out today is that Google revamped the homepage of the Settings application to make items thicker. This particular design choice will need to be used selectively by application developers, as it significantly reduces “content density” or the amount of useful information you can put on the screen. For example, Google would do well to ignore this specific adjustment in Gmail.

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Putting it all together, the Google Files app could receive a significant overhaul of the NEXT Material. The mockup above uses a banner in the top third to keep everything within reach of the thumb, recolor the application background to standard blue, and uses thicker list items.

Bonus: Google Fit

Seeing these – in some important cases – redesign suggestions, it’s natural to imagine how long it can take for Google apps to really keep up with what’s happening on Android 12. In the process of assembling this collection, we realized that Google Fit is already using flexible banner of the upper third in some places. Accept whatever you want.

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