The Android 12 Experience: A Material U First Look

As soon as I stepped into the demo environment with the latest beta version of Android 12, it was clear that things looked very different from my previous experiences with Android. The big buttons, volume control slider, and brightness slider at the top were unmistakable, but so too were the huge quick settings toggles and the large text throughout all the menus and settings. The text, in particular, is now larger, making it easier to read and navigate.

The power button has also seen a significant redesign, with three huge buttons arranged in a triangle for some reason, which may take some getting used to. Additionally, there's a new charging animation when you plug in your phone, sweeping up from the bottom of the charge port, and even more bouncy and friendly-looking animations around all this bigger text. As I mentioned earlier, this is still an early beta, so it's likely that things will continue to evolve over time.

One of the most noteworthy features for Material U is the color and style selections you can make to match your device. It's not a whole theme engine, but rather a wallpaper and style section where you can change your wallpaper, grid size, style, and accent colors of your buttons and icon shapes. This allows Material U to take the color of your wallpaper and choose a lock screen clock and quick settings accent colors to match what it thinks will look good with that wallpaper.

For example, with a yellow wallpaper, I was given a dark yellow clock for contrast, which is typical of Material U's approach to finding complementary or pastel versions of the primary color. When I switched to a mostly blue wallpaper, everything adjusted accordingly, showing some smart contrast and readability adjustments. This feature will continue to evolve as we get closer to the final version of Android 12.

It's worth noting that this Material U stuff is currently exclusive to Pixel devices, so when you get your hands on Android 12 on your phone (which may be a different device), it might have a slightly different aesthetic. However, you'll likely see many of the same features and general themes.

My experience with Android 12 has been overwhelmingly positive, and I've grown accustomed to its unique design language over the course of the beta testing process. The Material U system has become very cohesive, making the entire device feel like one seamless experience. Changing your wallpaper changes your life, as I often joke.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up mkbhd here and it is that time of year where we've got a new version of android and all the fun stuff that comes with it now we usually have a name for the version as well it's usually named after a suite like marshmallow or kitkat or oreo jelly bean something like that uh i guess that got a little too crazy because now we're just on straight numbers so android 12. but this this feels like easily the biggest android redesigned to happen since maybe the beginning like i feel like i've seen a lot of visual changes to android over the years but this is truly the biggest one because visually everything is different literally everything i feel like i was actually kind of surprised when i saw all these big changes because android's been you know maturing and you know doing little refinements and subtle tweaks over the years but i'm on beta 2 of android 12 here on this pixel 5 and both under the hood and on the surface there's a lot to take in so i'm going to go through my top five biggest changes slash biggest new features in order of importance so of course the timeline for when you get this update is going to depend on what phone you have some of you with pixels will get this update earlier than others but when you do finally get android 12 you should be prepared you should know what to expect so this video is for you okay so number five this is a more of a back end thing actually but android is just going to be getting even smoother and faster and i've talked about this in the past you want to see them get as fast and smooth as possible close the gap with ios and so i always welcome this stuff so in android 12 google streamlined the cpu time for core system services by 22 that's a pretty big jump that means no matter what hardware you're on whether you have an older chip or a snapdragon 8 as long as it's running android 12 things should feel a bit smoother less jitter less jank and stutter again this is beta 2 on my pixel but i'm already liking a lot of the new animations and the overall smoothness of things when flipping through the ui and you know there's no limit to how much optimization is a good thing but with this software combined with the rumor sort of floating around that google may be designing their own silicon for the first time on this next pixel that combined could be pretty sweet as far as overall experience i don't want to get my hopes up too high but just want to give that a shout out now number four these i think might fly under the radar a little bit because not everybody uses these but widgets there are new widgets so there's a new widget selector and there's a new set of all completely redesigned widgets in android 12. now this is the beta 2 right now so i just have the new widget picker but i love this just mainly because for every app that has any widgets it now will show you in line every single widget that that app gives you how it'll look before you even add it to the home screen so there's no guessing when you start adding things and that's very intuitive again you probably only have to set up your widgets occasionally maybe once in a while but that's great now the newly redesigned widgets themselves aren't in this software yet but i have some screen recordings straight from google themselves that really show what some of these new widgets are about and they are really really different they're really different this new clock is a very different look like it's a little more abstract with the date rotating around instead of a second hand it's a lot it's definitely a lot and so theoretically google is going to finish updating all of their stock app widgets so that developers can see what they can do with this new functionality and to just get the whole look together so far i'm excited just to see what it looks like when it all comes together so then number three privacy now you might not think of google and privacy in the same sentence very often but seriously there is a commendable amount of privacy controls here you have a lot more control in your hands and i think that's going to be the key word the control so first of all they added these indicators to the top corner for when your camera or microphone are being accessed by an app they're both green and they're in the top right corner this is something ios has been doing for a while that we were asking for although it might have been cool if they were different colors like in ios but it's a little bigger and you get a little icon the point is now you immediately know if an app is using your camera or mic and if you want to change that access it's easy you swipe down from the top and tap that indicator to go straight into the permissions of whatever app just triggered it then you can take away that access then you also have a couple optional quick setting buttons you can add they're not there by default but if you want to add them you can have a quick setting toggle to immediately turn off camera access or microphone access to everything so if you're about to do something or say something for some reason you don't want any apps on your phone to have that access to the camera or mic you just flip the switch and it turns it off and so no app will get accessed until you enable that again so all that's nice for peace of mind that's that's another level above and beyond what we see on the iphone so that's cool then if all of that wasn't enough there's also now a privacy dashboard inside the settings and that privacy dashboard will literally show you for your location or camera or microphone or anything else an actual timeline laid out of every single app that has access that sensor or that information and when it did it so that'll make it much easier to see exactly what's going on if there's any rogue apps doing crazy things in the background killing your battery pinging your location all the time you better believe it'll show up here and you can just get rid of it straight away and then lastly when apps ask for your location for the first time there's a new toggle that will let you select giving them your precise location or just giving them your approximate location just the neighborhood you're in that's pretty useful so for maps for example i'm of course going to give it my precise location because i want to use it for navigation and it just needs to know where i am but hey for any other apps that don't need to know all that maybe my weather app or a news app i still want local news and local weather but i can choose approximate locations so they can't do any weird ad tracking with my exact latitude and longitude that's pretty sweet okay so number two these new quick settings so it's obviously aesthetically very different it might even be the most aesthetically like defining feature of android 12 like every preview you see definitely shows this stuff but there's also some new functionality too so you pull down from the top and you've got these huge toggles that are separated from the notifications area you can see this to me is interesting because i remember so much previous google talk about getting rid of wasted space and minimizing the blank empty space but now there's this big clear separation here and actually think it's nice then when you pull down again you get this huge brightness slider at the very top and these gigantic tiles for whenever you want a quick setting it's of course still customizable like i showed so you can add or remove toggles but there's also a setting shortcut and a power menu shortcut underneath it all the internet selector ui is a little bit different too so when you have a sim card in your phone it's going to show you both wi-fi networks and your cell connection in one place which is nice i think it consolidates two buttons into one and of course you'll also still have ongoing notifications that show up at the top too like if you're playing music or something that's unchanged but it's going to be at the top with the quick settings instead of mixed in with the rest of the notifications generally though i think i like this new look it's definitely like it's very different and it takes some getting used to but the toggles being way bigger obviously take up more space but also they're huge touch targets now they're hard to miss you get the mic access and the camera access tiles and the screen recording tile is great and so that brings us to number one which has just got to be the whole new look the new aesthetic material you just the whole new design here so if you don't remember material design is a sort of guideline that google's been using since 2014 to help developers make their apps look like they were made for android so they fit into the look material u with this new aesthetic is a sort of an evolution of that that's a bit more personal as you can tell by the name so obviously things look very different there's the big buttons we talked about the big volume control slider big brightness slider at the top huge quick settings toggles and even all the text through all the menus and settings is also now larger there's a new power button menu which puts these three huge buttons in a triangle for some reason and there's also a new charging animation when you plug in your phone sort of sweeps up from the bottom from the charge port and there's even more bouncy and friendly looking animations around all this bigger text and this is still in an early beta like i said so i'm sure stuff will keep getting added over time like the screen on and off animation that they showed on stage at i o where it would like emanate out of the power button but probably the most noteworthy thing here for material u is the color and style selections that you can make to match it to basically a theme that you make for your device so it's not exactly a whole theme engine but now in settings there's a wallpaper and style section where you can change your wallpaper you can change the grid size you can change the style and accent colors of your buttons and your icon shapes and all of that and then material u will take the color of your wallpaper and choose a lock screen clock and quick settings accent colors to match what it thinks will look good with that wallpaper so with this yellow wallpaper for example as soon as you set it it gave me this dark yellow clock for contrast and it seems like it typically sticks with lighter kind of pastely versions of the primary color or complementary color of the wallpaper so since it's a totally yellow wallpaper i got yellow quick settings but when i switch to this mostly blue wallpaper you can see everything adjust here and it's been pretty smart about contrast and everything so far to keep things readable but yeah this is another feature that's going to continue to evolve into the final version of android 12 when it comes out later this year but it's already a pretty cool touch just making the whole device feel like one cohesive experience change your wallpaper change your life that's what i always say um now this material use stuff is just on pixel for now something to keep in mind and this whole android 12 experience it's just the way google is making it on their phone which is the pixel so when you get it on your phone if it's a oneplus if it's a different samsung look it might have a different aesthetic to it but you'll see a lot of the same features and general themes but yeah let me know what you think are you a fan of this new change it's a pretty big one i feel like it it takes some getting used to like when i saw it on video i wasn't as convinced i would like it but after using i've gotten used to it now with a day of the beta and i feel like i'll continue to like it more and more as i use it but yeah that's it also i've done an interview with google's ceo sundar pachai so if you haven't watched that video already i'll link it below like button and we also did we also did a deep dive on all this material you stuff on episode 65 of the waveform podcast which is now on youtube so i'll leave a link to the waveform podcast youtube channel below as well and big shout out to the sponsor of this video expressvpn because if you care about the privacy features that i just showed you in the latest version of android well then you'll probably also want a vpn because even if you are on this latest version every time you search or watch something or tweet or really do anything from your phone it's pretty common for third parties to snoop on that which is not cool so i protect my data with expressvpn so one of the most tracked data points out there is your ip address and so that can be used to identify you and your location but with expressvpn my connection is rerouted through an encrypted server making my ip address much more difficult for third parties to track on any of my devices but then on top of that because the server can be somewhere else you can unlock thousands of new shows that are not available in your region because you can convince whoever service you're using that you're in a different region based on what the server is so i've been watching plenty of top gear it's not available on the us netflix but it's only available on netflix uk so with expressvpn it's easy i literally just switch my location to the uk and i can watch it so protect your data and get more content with expressvpn it's that simple you can visit the link below you can go to expressvpn.commkbhd to get three months for free either way that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace\n"