Android 12 introduces a new Material You UI design

Affected by the coronavirus epidemic last year, Google did not hold its annual I/O developer conference, but it returned this year. However, for non-app developers, I/O 2021 without new hardware releases may not be too attractive, although Google is actually bringing a new generation of Android 12 systems this time.

The smartphone operating system has been very mature this year. There are really no essential new features and improvements. Even if it’s a new generation system, the new additions are all minor repairs, so Google changes the Android features this time. Start on the UI that most makes users feel the big changes. Android 12 uses the new Material You design language. This is another major UI improvement for Android since the Material Design design was proposed in 2014.

In addition to redrawing basic UI elements such as icons, windows, and buttons, the new Material You design also introduces an API called “color extraction” which was used to absorb the main color of the wallpaper and apply it to the overall UI theme color matching to make the entire UI style look more coordinated. For example, if the user selects a green wallpaper, the buttons, background, clock font, etc. will all be displayed in the corresponding green color. This API has actually begun to appear in some effects on Android 5.0, and now it is more comprehensively applied on the entire UI.

However, since almost all mobile phone manufacturers have chosen to make their own UI and only use the bottom layer of Android, the Material You of Google will actually only appear on their own Pixel series phones that can be upgraded to Android 12. However, Google said that this is not only Android, but this new UI design language will be used in their web pages, Chrome OS, smart cars, and other entire ecosystems.