C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Over the past few weeks, we’ve tracked a number of Material 3 Expressive changes in development for Google’s Phone all.
- Last week testers in the Phone beta program first started seeing some of these changes arrive.
- This week Google confirms the rollout and details exactly what’s changing and why.
Google’s Android apps are currently in a state of flux, as a wave of Material 3 Expressive washes over them with a coat of its new design language. We’ve already been tracking this progress across many of the company’s apps, and that includes the stalwart Phone dialer. After uncovering some early efforts to freshen up Phone last month, we finally started seeing some of those updates rolling out to beta testers last week. With the cat out of the bag, Google’s now stepping forward to talk a little about why it’s changing what it is.
Google confirms what we observed before, in that users registered for the Phone beta are beginning to see these M3E changes arrive. The company emphasizes that it’s introducing the new look gradually, so don’t be surprised if you’re in the beta and haven’t yet noticed anything new — it’s on the way; just hold tight.
One of the most obvious tweaks there, besides the general embrace of Material 3 Expressive with its big touch-friendly bulbous UI elements, is that new call-pickup control. Rather than discrete buttons for answering or rejecting, we’re seeing the implementation of the new slider interface we’ve been tracking in development.
Google says that it’s trying out this new design after getting feedback that it was too easy to accidentally reject a call you actually wanted to take with the old system — or maybe worse, accidentally answering when you didn’t mean to.
The company also points to improvements we can see in the new home view. There, Google says it’s eliminated threading to give your call log nice at-a-glance visibility with a simple chronological layout. And up top, that bar makes favorite contacts simple to access without needing to further dig around within the app.
That all sounds pretty good to us, and so far we’ve been reasonably pleased with the M3E changes coming to Phone and the rest of Google’s Android software library. This is all still in development, though, and Google’s taking feedback that could lead to further changes down the road. If you want to make sure you’re seeing the latest tweaks as they land, make sure you register for Phone’s beta program.
