Check out Google’s Material You showcase app, now in the Play Store

‘Now in Android’ is Google’s ideal vision of Material Design 3

Last year’s Android 12 update significantly revamped the user interface elements of your smartphone. It also brought the Material You design guidelines in tow for developers to abide by, showcased neatly in an app called Now in Android. The app, which currently showcases Material 3 guidelines, has been available through a GitHub repository for a few months. If you’re a fledgling developer looking to perfect your UI, you can finally download the app directly from the Play Store.

As first spotted by 9to5Google, Now in Android on the Play Store means developers don’t need to check GitHub manually for Google’s updated guidelines. Although the Play Store listing explicitly states that the app is still in early stages of development, a Play Store listing allows people to enable auto-updates for staying abreast with the developments. Since the app’s Git repository was created, Google planned to create a Play Store listing for the app, and it is great to see the plan become a reality.

If you haven’t heard of this app before, it’s because it is intended specifically as a resource for developers. The Now in Android app helps app makers understand and implement Google’s Material design in their creations. The search titan details its design philosophy in scores of Medium blogs and YouTube videos, but an app showing off the very principles Google advocates serves as an excellent real-world reference point. By Google’s own admission, the app showcases “best practices, opinionated designs, and solutions to complex real-world problems which other sample apps don’t handle.”

On this app, developers can find the latest articles and guidelines shared by Google’s developer relations team. They can also follow specific topics of their interest and authors who write about topics they are interested in. Now that this app is on the Play Store, it is an easily-accessible resource for anyone interested in Google’s ever-evolving design — even if they aren’t developers per se. And if you are, the source code remains accessible on GitHub.