Designing with personality: Introducing Material 3 Expressive for Wear OS

Posted by Chiara Chiappini – Android Developer Relations Engineer, and Kevin Hufnagle - Android Technical Writer
This post is part of Wear OS Spotlight Week. Today, we're focusing on creating modern, premium designs using the Material 3 Expressive design system.

When crafting the user interface for your Wear OS app or tile, consider how your experience expresses your brand while respecting the performance guidelines for watches, particularly battery use. With the new Material 3 Expressive design system, you can build performant UIs that truly shine on a wearable device.

A gallery of Wear OS screens that demonstrate Material 3 Expressive, including a curved edge button, a wavy progress circle, and different shapes for “cancel” and “confirm” buttons.
A gallery of Material 3 Expressive experiences on Wear OS

This blog post walks you through the key principles of this new design system and how you can implement them to create more engaging and intuitive user experiences.

What’s new in Material 3 Expressive?

As mentioned in our announcement at I/O earlier this year and our unveiling of Google Pixel Watch 4 last week, Material 3 Expressive introduces several fundamental improvements from previous Wear OS design guidance, which aim to give your apps and tiles more personality and help users feel confident that they’re successfully taking quick actions on a round screen.

The key design principles include the following:

    • Embrace the round form factor: Use the full screen with components like the edge-hugging button to complement the watch's form factor. This makes the UI feel well-suited for a user's wrist.
    • Apply the proper screen layout on each surface: Take advantage of the new layouts and components—such as the 3-slot tile PrimaryLayout and the TransformingLazyColumn – to create more consistent, glanceable, and fluid user experiences for tiles and apps.
    • Elevate your experience: The dynamic color system provides a richer palette for more vibrant themes in apps. Variable fonts allow for dynamic, customizable typography.
    • Show off expressive animations: Light up your Wear OS experience with meaningful movement, such as spring animations and shape morphing.

      Embrace the round form factor

      Material 3 Expressive for Wear OS differentiates itself from systems designed for rectangular screens, offering a framework of components that are designed specifically for round screens, using the entire circular canvas to its full potential.

      A button that appears near the bottom of the screen has a flat top but a curved bottom, forming a half-moon shape that better fits the circular screen.
      The edge-hugging button’s animated entrance and shape emphasizes the round form factor

      One of the most noticeable examples of this is the edge-hugging button. It features a curved bottom edge that perfectly complements the round display. It’s a small but significant detail that helps make Material 3 Expressive feel right at home on your users’ wrists.

      Apply the proper screen layout on each surface

      Apps

      For apps that let users scroll through content, Material 3 Expressive introduces the TransformingLazyColumn component. It provides built-in support for expressive and fluid scrolling animations that follow the side edges of the display. We’ve also added a new ScrollIndicator that provides a clear visual cue of the user’s position within a list. (This appears automatically when you use ScreenScaffold.) This, combined with the fluid animations of the TransformingLazyColumn, creates a more intuitive and engaging scrolling experience.

      When the user scrolls through the list, the items near the top and bottom shrink in width.
      When using a TransformingLazyColumn, elements appear to get smaller as they get close to the top and bottom edge of the screen

      For apps that don’t require scrolling, such as media players or confirmation dialogs, Material 3 Expressive provides templates that are optimized for glanceability and focus. These layouts rely on breakpoints and pagination to present a single task or set of controls to the user, minimizing distractions.

      Tiles

      The Material 3 Expressive design system also lets designers and developers create tiles that are both functional and visually engaging:

      The middle part of the tile shows information about the current number of glasses of water having been consumed today, and the bottom part includes a button that lets users add another glass.
      Tiles offer at-a-glance information and support quick actions to indicate progress on a task, such as drinking more water

      Tiles can show a static message about a recent update, invite users to get started, and show progress of an ongoing activity related to fitness, media, and more.

      The new 3-slot tile layout is designed to work for each of these use cases, as well as across a range of screen sizes, to provide a clear and consistent structure for your tile’s content.

      Elevate your experience

      Give your app or tile a signature look using extended color palettes and custom typography.

      Color

      The updated color system in Material 3 Expressive supports more colors—such as tertiary colors—to let you better reflect your brand’s personality and create a more immersive user experience. Use this color system to create themes that perfectly capture the mood of your brand, whether that’s a calming meditation app, the high-energy vibe of a fitness tracker, or something in between.

      With Material 3 Expressive, apps and tiles can either follow the dynamic system color or stick to the brand colors. We especially recommend following the dynamic system colors in your tiles, for higher cohesion with other tiles. You can embrace dynamic colors in your app as well, for instance exposing settings to the user.

      Based on the main colors in the user’s chosen watch face, the design system extracts the 2 most common hues and dynamically chooses several more complementary colors. These colors are applied to the tiles that appear on the user’s watch.
      Dynamic color theme derived from the user-selected watch face (left), applied to a tile (right)

      Typography

      Typography is another key element of expressive design. Material 3 Expressive moves beyond static font weights and styles and embraces the versatility of variable fonts.

      A single font contains adjustable axes, including weight and width. With Material 3 Expressive, you can tap into these customized looks to create dynamic and delightful typographic experiences.

      The text “book club” is thicker than normal, using a larger font weight.
      A font that uses an adjusted weight. If desired, you can also use a different width to s t r e t c h the text.

      Show off expressive animations

      A foundational pillar of Material 3 Expressive’s animation capabilities is the concept of fluid motion, made possible primarily through shape morphing.

      In the 3x3 grid of buttons 1 through 9, when the 9 button is pressed, its left edge moves to the left, and the 8 button shrinks its width to accommodate.
      When the “9” button is pressed, the “8” button moves out of the way to accommodate the expanded size of the “9” button.

      Components no longer have to be rigid – they can now dynamically change their shape in response to user input! Buttons, in particular, can transform shape and size to achieve eye-catching springy animation effects and provide more visual contrast between states such as “play” and “pause.” This not only makes the UI more visually interesting but also helps in guiding the user’s attention and providing clear feedback.

      An experience that’s ready for prime time!

      By adopting the Material 3 Expressive design system, you can create Wear OS apps and tiles that feel more dynamic, personal, and intuitive. By applying principles like rounded components, screen layouts, richer color palettes, and spring animations, you can build experiences that feel perfectly designed for use on a user’s wrist.

      To get you inspired, we’ve included some examples from some of Google’s apps below:

      On the left, the accept call button is a bottom edge-hugging button; on the right-hand side of each item in the list, there’s a toggle button to turn a given alarm on and off.
      Edge-hugging button for an incoming call using the Phone app (left); toggle buttons in the Alarms app (right)
      On the left, The tile includes selectable icons in the middle, such as navigating home, and a bottom edge-hugging button that lets you search for a particular destination; on the right A wavy progress bar moves around the play/pause button in the middle of the tile.
      At-a-glance actions within the tile for the Google Maps app (left); progress of ongoing audio playback in the Media Controls (right)

      Get started with Material 3 Expressive for Wear OS

      To learn more, explore the following resources:

      We can’t wait to see the designs that you create and share with the Wear OS community!

Beta Channel Update for ChromeOS / ChromeOS Flex

The ChromeOS Dev channel is being updated to OS version 16371.20.0 (Browser version 140.0.7339.29) for most ChromeOS devices.

If you find new issues, please let us know one of the following ways:
  1. File a bug

  2. Visit our ChromeOS communities

    1. General: Chromebook Help Community

    2. Beta Specific: ChromeOS Beta Help Community

  3. Report an issue or send feedback on Chrome

  4. Interested in switching channels? Find out how.

Luis Menezes

Google ChromeOS

Google Workspace Updates Weekly Recap – August 22, 2025

 

Previous announcements
The announcements below were published on the Workspace Updates blog earlier this week. Please refer to the original blog posts for complete details.

Edit your Google Drive videos in your browser, using Google Vids
Users now have a quicker way to start editing right from Drive, using Google Vids. With this launch, when a user is previewing their video in Drive, there will be an "Open" button in the upper right that will open the video in Vids. Vids will automatically open the video file, and from there you can further edit as you see fit. | Learn more about editing Drive videos with Vids.

Let others easily book time with you using the new pre-configured Google Calendar booking page
We’re excited to introduce a new way to access all your booking pages directly in the Calendar side bar. Plus, users who don’t have an appointment schedule yet will now have a pre-configured booking page. | Learn more about using the new booking pages in Google Calendar.

Incorporate information from Calendar, Tasks, and Keep in your conversations with Gemini Live
With this launch, you can reference Calendar, Tasks, and Keep in your conversations with Gemini Live. Gemini Live enables in-depth two way conversations to help you brainstorm ideas, explore new concepts, and more. | Learn more about using Gemini Live with Calendar, Tasks, and Keep.

Effortlessly work with ServiceNow data across Google Chat and Sheets
ServiceNow is now integrated with Google Chat and Sheets. With the ServiceNow and Google Chat integration, users are now able to interact directly with ServiceNow's Virtual Agent within Google Chat. With the ServiceNow and Google Sheets integration, users can bypass manual file downloads and uploads and export data from ServiceNow directly into Sheets. | Learn more about using ServiceNow with Chat and Sheets. 

Arrow keys now move an object by a pixel distance in Google Slides
Prior to today, when using the arrow keys to move objects in Google Slides, the object would move a great distance. To improve upon this experience, the using the arrow keys to “nudge” an object will now move by 1 pixel. | Learn more about moving objects in Google Slides. 

Create and manage student groups using the Google Classroom API
We are excited to announce the launch of the Google Classroom API Student Groups endpoints which enable developers to manage student groups and group members on behalf of administrators and teachers. | Learn more about using the Classroom API to create and manage student groups. 

Listen to your documents using Gemini in Google Docs
For those who prefer to listen to document content, we’re excited to introduce the ability to create audio versions of your documents using Gemini in Google Docs. | Learn more about listening to Google Docs.

Improving the ISEMAIL and ISURL functions in Google Sheets
To ensure more domains and email addresses are properly recognized by functions, we’re improving the way =ISURL() and =ISEMAIL() are evaluated to more accurately return TRUE when appropriate. | Learn more about the ISEMAIL and ISURL functions in Google Sheets. 

Catch up on unread messages within a conversation in Google Chat
You can currently use Gemini in Google Chat to summarize unread conversations in the Chat home view and to summarize files shared in conversations. To build upon this, we’re adding the ability to catch up on unread messages in a direct message, group conversation, or space. | Learn more about catching up on unread messages using Gemini in Google Chat. 

Coming soon: A refreshed user interface for Google Meet hardware touch controllers, test it now in preview
In the coming weeks, we will be introducing an updated user interface for some Google Meet hardware. To explore this upcoming feature, we encourage Admins to change the feature preview setting to enable Early preview for their devices. | Learn more about the new Meet hardware interface.

Increased credit limit for Google AI Ultra for Business users and expanded country availability to Whisk
With this launch, we are increasing the credit limit to use with Whisk and Flow for Google AI Ultra for Business users from 12,500 per user per month to 25,000 per user per month. | Learn more about the increased credits and expanded country availability for Whisk. 

The latest Gemini Nano with on-device ML Kit GenAI APIs

Posted by Caren Chang - Developer Relations Engineer, Joanna (Qiong) Huang - Software Engineer, and Chengji Yan - Software Engineer

The latest version of Gemini Nano, our most powerful multi-modal on-device model, just launched on the Pixel 10 device series and is now accessible through the ML Kit GenAI APIs. Integrate capabilities such as summarization, proofreading, rewriting, and image description directly into your apps.

With GenAI APIs we’re focused on giving you access to the latest version of Gemini Nano while providing consistent quality across devices and model upgrades. Here’s a sneak peak behind the scenes of some of the things we’ve done to achieve this.

Adapting GenAI APIs for the latest Gemini Nano

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to build AI powered features, using the most powerful models. To ensure GenAI APIs provide consistent quality across different model versions, we make many behind the scenes improvements including rigorous evals and adapter training.

  1. Evaluation pipeline: For each supported language, we prepare an evaluation dataset. We then benchmark the evals through a combination of: LLM-based raters, statistical metrics and human raters.
  2. Adapter training: With results from the evaluation pipeline, we then determine if we need to train feature-specific LoRA adapters to be deployed on top of the Gemini Nano base model. By shipping GenAI APIs with LoRA adapters, we ensure each API meets our quality bar regardless of the version of Gemini Nano running on a device.

The latest Gemini Nano performance

One area we're excited about is how this updated version of Gemini Nano pushes performance even higher, especially the prefix speed - that is how fast the model processes input.

For example, here are results when running text-to-text and image-to-text benchmarks on a Pixel 10 Pro.

Prefix Speed - Gemini nano-v2 on Pixel 9 Pro Prefix Speed - Gemini nano-v2* on Pixel 10 Pro Prefix Speed - Gemini nano-v3 on Pixel 10 Pro
Text-to-text 510 tokens/second 610 tokens/second 940 tokens/second
Image-to-text 510 tokens/second + 0.8 seconds for image encoding 610 tokens/second + 0.7 seconds for image encoding 940 tokens/second + 0.6 seconds for image encoding
*Experimentation with Gemini nano-v2 on Pixel 10 Pro for benchmarking purposes. All Pixel 10 Pros launched with Gemini nano-v3.

The future of Gemini Nano with GenAI APIs

As we continue to improve the Gemini Nano model, the team is committed to using the same process to ensure consistent and high quality results from GenAI APIs.

We hope this will significantly reduce the effort to integrate Gemini Nano in your Android apps while still allowing you to take full advantage of new versions and their improved capabilites.

Learn more about GenAI APIs

Start implementing GenAI APIs in your Android apps today with guidance from our official documentation and samples: GenAI API Catalog and ML Kit GenAI APIs quickstart samples.

Edit your Google Drive videos in your browser, using Google Vids

What’s changing 

Users now have a quicker way to start editing right from Drive, using Google Vids. With this launch, when a user is previewing their video in Drive, there will be an "Open" button in the upper right that will open the video in Vids. Vids will automatically open the video file, and from there you can further edit as you see fit. For example, you can then trim the clip, add music, add text, and much more. 


Who’s impacted 

End users 

Additional details 

  • This feature works for these file types. Individual clips have limits of 35 minutes and 4 GB. 
  • Once Vids opens the video file, a new Vids file is created. Users will need to go through the regular steps to save/export to a non-Vids editable file. 

Getting started 

Admins: 
  • Vids will be ON by default and can be disabled at the organizational level. However, if Google Docs are turned OFF in your domain, Vids access will be unavailable. 
  • Visit the Help Center to learn more about turning Vids on or off for users. 

End users: 

Rollout pace 


Availability 

Available for Google Workspace: 
  • Business Starter, Standard, and Plus 
  • Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus 
  • Essentials Enterprise Essentials and Enterprise Essentials Plus 
  • Nonprofits 
  • Education Fundamentals, Standard and Plus 
Anyone who previously purchased these add-ons will also receive this feature: 
  • Gemini Business* 
  • Gemini Enterprise* 
*As of January 15, 2025, we’re no longer offering the Gemini Business and Gemini Enterprise add-ons for sale. Please refer to this announcement for more details.

Also available to:
  • Google AI Pro and Ultra  

Resources 

Let others easily book time with you using the new pre-configured Google Calendar booking page

What’s changing 

Following our recent announcement of the ability to share your Google Calendar appointment booking page directly in your email, we’re excited to introduce a new way to access all your booking pages directly in the Calendar side bar. Plus, users who don’t have an appointment schedule yet will now have a pre-configured booking page. 

With this launch, users who don’t have an appointment schedule set up yet will see a pre-configured booking page entry in the Calendar side bar that makes scheduling 1:1s with external users much easier. The pre-configured booking page is based on your working hours, and will automatically update to avoid conflicts on your calendar.


Users that already have appointment schedules set up can now see all their booking pages in the Calendar sidebar on web and in the mobile Calendar apps. 

To help users with multiple schedules manage their commitments on the Calendar grid better, we’re adding a new setting that allows users to show / hide an individual appointment schedule from the Calendar grid on web and mobile. Learn more here. 

Who’s impacted 

End users 

Why you’d use it 

By providing users with an easier way to book time with others, this change streamlines the scheduling process, which is particularly useful for customers, partners or people outside an organization who might not have visibility into another’s calendar. 

Additional details 

  • Once a user has seen the pre-configured booking page automatically appear in the web version of Calendar, they will then be able to see it on the mobile version as well. 
  • Sharing a booking page is available on web and mobile apps. 
  • Creating, editing and deleting a booking page is only available on web. 
  • If you change your working hours at a later date, you will need to update the availability of your appointment schedule manually to reflect this change. 

Getting started 

  • Admins: There is no admin control for this feature. 
  • End users: 
    • On web: 
      • To allow others to book time with you, simply click “copy link” on the booking page entry in the Calendar side bar and share it with others. 
      • To edit your booking page, click the three dot menu next to the booking page > “Edit.” 
      • To show or hide the schedule rails from the grid, click the three dot menu next to the booking page > “Show on / Hide from grid” 
    • On mobile: 
      • To allow others to book time with you, tap on the menu top left, then select the booking page entry on the side bar, then “Share”. 
      • To show or hide the schedule rails from the grid, tap on the menu top left, then select the booking page entry on the side bar, then tap the three dot menu > “Show on / Hide from grid”
    • Visit the Help Center to learn about how to edit appointment schedules in Google Calendar 

Rollout pace 

Web: 
Mobile: 
  • Extended rollout (potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility) starting on August 21, 2025 

Availability 

  • Appointment schedules are available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual Subscribers, and users with personal Google accounts at no additional charge. 
    • Select features within appointment scheduling are only available to those with paid subscriptions. Please refer to this Help Center article to learn more. 

Resources 

What’s new in Gemini Code Assist

Gemini Code Assist's Agent Mode, now available in VS Code (Preview) and IntelliJ (Stable), streamlines complex coding tasks by proposing detailed plans for user review and approval. This intelligent, collaborative approach, enhanced with features like inline diffs and persistent chat history, aims to boost developer productivity and efficiency.

What’s new in Gemini Code Assist

Gemini Code Assist's Agent Mode, now available in VS Code (Preview) and IntelliJ (Stable), streamlines complex coding tasks by proposing detailed plans for user review and approval. This intelligent, collaborative approach, enhanced with features like inline diffs and persistent chat history, aims to boost developer productivity and efficiency.