Android’s new design language seems extremely… Gen Z.
This is obvious from the conceptual images of the disclosed blog post which has surfaced today (published by Google, as it tends to do). Although the theme is customizable, Google has highlighted pink, purple and coral throughout the interface. It is a resolutely younger, more bubbling and more fun design that shouts “look all this fresh painting!” And less “choose from one of these six popular shades of blue”. Google’s blog also confirms the push towards the attraction of young people. GOOD; The refreshment of the interface from time to time is a good and necessary prosecution. Aside from the inherent creak factor when a group of designers tries to quantify the attraction of young people in the graphics with labeled bars “Freshness attributes”, I cannot shake that none of this has much against the greatest Android obstacle to address the younger demography: the iPhone.
Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world. But here in the United States, Apple has A solid majority of all the phones sold. The figures are even more strongly towards iOS when you look at younger demography. A 2025 survey of investment bank Piper Sandler reports that 88% of adolescents interviewed have an iPhone. An article in 2023 in The Wall Street Journal noted that the children who dared to bring an Android phone to school faced teasing to use what is considered a phone for the elderly. Google, it seems, would like to do something about it.
Screenshots of the blog post, which were saved by 9TO5GOOGLEGive us an overview of what Google’s attempt looks like to call on young people. It is based on the equipment you, the interface that Google has introduced with Android 12, emphasizing customization. He added the possibility of modifying the color palette to the system scale according to your wallpaper, a feature that Apple has more or less copied in iOS 18 with an option to tint with home screen icons. Material three grows even further, mixing daring fonts, larger icons and vibrant colors.
The blog article Disclosed calls the Material three “most determined update to Google’s design system, never”. Google’s disclose post indicates that he has conducted 46 studies testing his new conceptions, with more than 18,000 participants. “Although there was a clear positive indication in all age groups, the younger participants in the study had the most enthusiastic preference for expressive M3, and also the note of conceptions as a visual attraction and an intention to use,” said post.
It is not all on young people. He also indicates: “… with expressive versions, we see an abolition of age effects in fixing times, helping users over 45 to behave equally with their younger counterparts.” Let us just remember that anyone who was 45 years old has probably owned a smartphone longer than the “younger counterparts” were alive, and I think they found the email sending button very well, but I appreciate consideration.
Google researchers asked participants to assess the conceptions of certain attributes, including these “freshness attributes” as “separating” and “fascinating”. Great! What does that mean?
Apparently Google thinks that it is an indicator that people could really be willing to go to Android according to these conceptions. “We have also seen that this freshness is not only a metric of vanity, but a positive engine of behavioral intention, which means that users are more likely to want to move to a product with this design.”
There is only so much google. No quantity of dynamic color treatments and “fascinating” icons will change the fact that an Android owner is always the green bubble of the group cat.
Apple knows that locking up people in Imessage is a huge factor to keep them in the ecosystem, especially with the phones that people give to their children. RCS has rendered the multiplatform cats much more bearable, but we are still not entirely at the parity of the functionalities – and these bubbles are always green.
Honestly, I do not hate the equipment three, and I look at a design that looks so different from iOS seems to me a better idea than making an introduction by iOS. But, at least on the American market, a decision by Apple to open Imessage and FaceTime would do more to increase Android sales than all that Google designers can imagine.
Is it fair? Not at all, and the regulators try to do something. The user interface does not hurt, but I don’t think it’s a situation that Google can be conceived.
