Ask HN: What's the point of Material Design You?

One could say that I've had a bit of an interesting relationship with Google's Material Design paradigm. When it was announced in 2014, I was very excited, despite not using a Android device at that time. It felt to me like an excellent example of 'Form Follows Function' in software UX, with elements that were simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and practical. For instance, widgets would seamlessly grow and shrink as you moved through the user interface relative to their importance in each context.

Only a few years after that, I became somewhat disillusioned with how Material Design was being promoted, since Google were starting to break their own design rules everywhere. That gave me the impression that applying Material Design as a software developer was playing into their monopolistic vision of a coherent 'Google ecosystem', when they weren't going to do their part in maintaining that coherency.

Fast-forward to the present, and, after a long break from using Android, I have just acquired a phone which runs Android 11. From an end-user perspective, I still love Material Design as much as I did back around 2014. It looks a little plain by contemporary standards, but when properly applied (among others, by RadioDroid, K9-Mail, NewPipe, Vinyl and AnkiDroid) it is delightfully efficient to use.

However, many apps now feature 'Material Design You', a supposedly improved version of the design language, which Google published in 2021. And my reaction, truth to tell, has been... 'meh?' I get a sense that the UX benefits are very shallow this time around. Here's what I can applaud it for:

* Prioritizing gestures: Material Design always had gestures (swipe, drag etc.), but they now seem to apply to entire panels rather than just specific widgets like menu drawers. That's generally a good thing because it increases the size of touch targets (Fitts' Law).

* Simplifying the standard layouts: it seems that layouts such as those that include menu drawers and tabs are less common now, favouring instead just a handful of top-level pages. I think that's pretty good, because most of the Material Design apps were too basic to really warrant those complex designs anyway.

At that point, I get stuck. What else? Some of the round corners are now square. Some of the square corners are now round. There's the customization aspect, but many apps with the original Material Design also allow you to choose the primary and accent colours. Nothing seems to be different with Material Design You except that Android uses murkier, unsaturated versions of your choice colours!

After my big Android-hiatus, I have the impression that Material Design kind of succeeded in what Google intended it to do: introduce a strong measure of GUI consistency to a wide variety of applications, whilst being touch-friendly and reasonably attractive. Yet, the Material Design You update seems to introduce an unsightly dichotomy between the 'old' and 'new' apps on your device (think Windows 8, or what you get if you mix Qt and GTK software) whilst providing very little in the way of UX improvements. I hope I'm missing something and my cynicism is unwarranted :)

I'm interested to hear what your thoughts and feelings are about this UI/UX saga!