TL;DR
- Material 3 Expressive is updating the look and feel of Google apps across Android, and is set to arrive later this year.
- Last week at I/O, Google offered devs a quick peek at how Meet is evolving for Material 3 Expressive.
- We’ve now managed to get a hands-on look at further Material changes coming to Meet.
Google has just drawn the curtain back on Material 3 Expressive, and over the past few weeks now, we’ve been getting some of our first looks at how this updated design language will impact some of our favorite apps — to say nothing of Android itself. During its I/O 2025 sessions last week, the company shared a tiny preview of how those changes will impact Meet, sharing the graphic you see above. That’s a fine start, but we’re not about to patiently wait around for that overhaul to roll out, and have put together an early preview for you.
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.
For this advanced look, we’re working with version 308.0.763202464.duo.android_20250525.16_p0.s of Meet. We’ve convinced the app to turn on its Material 3 Expressive changes ahead of schedule, so while none of these are visible in the app just yet, they should represent where Google’s development efforts at least currently lie.
In all these sets of screenshots, we’re looking at Meet as we have it now on the left, and the updated Material 3 Expressive interface on the right. For starters, we’ve got an update to the view for your call history with greatly improved contrast. That’s a trend that continues with the screen for manually joining a meeting, going for both enhanced readability and a more playful, rounded look. We also see a notice about the upcoming sunsetting of legacy Duo features, rendered with this new UI.
We start seeing some more pronounced changes with these next screens. Once you’ve selected a meeting, the view when you’re getting ready to join now features that big, bold button we first saw in Google’s teaser last week. That’s a change that similarly impacts the UI for direct person-to-person calls.
While one consequence of everything getting bigger means that we get slightly less information packed on-screen at once, we have to say that these new layouts feel a hell of a lot cleaner than before, and come across a lot more polished — Google is clearly making decisions here intent on making full use of available screen real estate.
Material 3 Expressive is set to formally start changing the face of Android apps at some point later this year, following the stable release of Android 16. While Google hasn’t yet explicitly confirmed as much, our time spent working on these early previews suggests to us that we could very well see app updates like this one come to Android 15, as well. For now, though, we’ll just have to wait and see.
