Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Personal Safety is rolling out an update that implements a new color scheme.
- While the app still doesn’t use your system palette, it does improve readability.
- Google has managed to mess up clock rendering, though, with the time fitting poorly on the screen.
Developers like Google are constantly trying out new looks for their apps, and not everyone’s going to be a fan of every change. But even if we prefer one layout over another, or thought an old workflow was superior, we generally expect these changes to still function properly — it’s one thing to go in a new direction we’re not sold on yet; it’s quite another to break something.
That’s just what we saw happening with Google’s Clock app recently, and while it still told the time just fine, updates to how the app rendered its font had those numerals jumping all over the place, or not even fitting properly on the screen. Google spoke up to reassure users that it knew what was wrong and was working on a fix, but now we’ve spotted another clock-related issue in another Google app redesign.
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We’re looking at version 2025.08.06.791860033.0-release_gms of Google’s Personal Safety app. We already saw the app start picking up new Material 3 Expressive elements earlier this summer, and while Google isn’t seriously changing any of that here, it has blessed the app with a new color palette.
⚠️ 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.
So far, so good. While the app still doesn’t pay attention to your system color theme for its Material palette, these are all pretty smart changes than enhance contrast and aid with visibility — which for an app like Personal Safety, is all the more important. And if it weren’t for one little clock, we might call this update an unambiguous win:
Well, maybe not so “little,” actually. Just like we saw with the Clock app itself, Google has a real problem right now getting the time to render in a size that makes sense. Here it’s right at the edge of actually introducing readability problems, but we think we can safely say this is not how Google intended things to appear.
It’s a little frustrating to see oversights like this when installing a new update, but all things considered, we can’t find much reason to get too bent out of shape here. Hopefully whatever Google’s working on for the Clock fix will also help here — if these even are connected at all, and we’re not just witnessing a bizarre spate of unrelated Google-app clock bugs.
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