When the first signs of Material 3 Expressive started showing up in Android’s QPR betas, I wasn’t impressed. Even as my colleague Mishaal raved about it and how good it looked and documented its progress in every beta, I still didn’t jump on that hype train. When the update finally landed with Android 16 QPR1, I avoided installing it for a few weeks. In my mind, I was protesting against another unnecessary design change.
Material You was good enough. It still looked nice, it worked well, I was used to it, and everyone I knew with a Pixel phone was used to it. It didn’t need a facelift and thousands of wasted development resources when Google’s teams could’ve spent that time implementing actually useful features instead of Material 3 Expressive. At least that’s what I thought. Then I set up my new Pixel 10 Pro XL and… I was smitten.