After it was leaked online, Google has now officially launched ‘Material 3 Expressive’, a dynamic enhancement to its Material Design system, set to debut with Android 16 and Wear OS 6. Revealed during the Android Show ahead of Google I/O 2025, this update builds upon the Material You aesthetic. The latest design highlights personalization through dynamic colour schemes, adaptive typography, and responsive animations.
This newly introduced design will roll out later this year with Android 16 and Wear OS 6, starting with Google’s own Pixel devices first.
The design language introduces a broader colour palette. It features bold shades like purples, pinks, and corals, aiming to infuse the interface with energy. It also expands dynamic colour theming by drawing from personal elements like wallpapers to generate cohesive, system-wide palettes. This theming now integrates more deeply across Google’s ecosystem, with apps like Gmail, Google Photos, and Fitbit adopting the updated visual framework to ensure a consistent and personalized user experience. Even elevation (which was traditionally represented by shadows) now uses tonal colour overlays. This creates a finer and integrated way to represent depth.
“Through 46 separate research studies with hundreds of designs, and more than 18,000 participants from around the world, we’ve dialed-in a system that’s both beautiful and highly usable,” Google noted in its previous blog post.
Meanwhile, typography sees a significant shift as well. Google has adopted variable fonts like Roboto Flex and Roboto Serif. These fonts offer a wide range of thicknesses and styles that adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices.
The design overhaul also introduces functional enhancements like customizable app icons, adaptive layouts, and refined quick settings tiles that can be resized and rearranged. In detail, the Quick Settings panel has been redesigned to offer more flexibility, allowing users to prioritize their most-used actions like ‘Do Not Disturb’ or ‘Flashlight’.
Notifications have also been improved to highlight important updates more prominently. Additionally, a new standout feature – ‘Live Updates’ – ensures that real-time, glanceable progress notifications (like tracking an Uber Eats delivery) remain front and center without getting buried. Even animations in Material 3 Expressive are not solely decorative, they are designed to guide users smoothly through transitions and interactions. The design also focuses on responsive haptics and motion, making sure that user interactions feel natural and easy.
For Wear OS 6, Material 3 Expressive has been specifically customized to address the notable limitations and capabilities of round displays. For example, scrolling interactions now follow the natural curvature of the screen, creating an illusion of depth as lists animate responsively. Interestingly, the tech giant also claims up to a 10% improvement in battery efficiency due to deeper optimization across both the interface and core system functions.
However, despite all these advancements, there are concerns about some critical limitations of Material 3 Expressive. For example, some of the advanced features, like dynamic colour theming and responsive animations, may not work optimally on older devices. Additionally, the visually rich interface could impact battery life.
