Google’s Material Design Streamlines Android Without The Need For Silver
Google’s new Material Design is the answer to a peculiar riddle. What do you get when you mix a physics engine mixed with the principles of flat design and unleash it on mobile apps and the Web?
Material Design is Google’s new design language that will inform how all of its apps — and yours — will look going forward. Google thinks of Material as a metaphor, “the unifying theory of rationalized space and a system of motion.”
Material Design is meant to be tactile, giving weights to objects in the design based on a “paper” layout scheme that can mimic vertical representations of a “Z-Axis” to give the allusion of height and dimensionality to an app’s user interface.
See also: The Basics Of Google’s Material Design, Explained
As a design concept, Material is robust and enlightened. But Google has more motives with Material than just making things look pretty and functional.
Google’s End Run Around Manufacturer Skins
Google has rolled out the Material Design language — and while people may agree or disagree as to whether it has improved usability, there is little doubt that it is very, very specific — particularly when compared to Apple’s user interface design guidelines. How specific? Let’s just consider the difference in size between Apple’s guidelines and Google. Apple’s guidelines are basically a few pages. Google wrote a huge tome full of specifications, examples and animations, all with the goal of leaving little to the imagination in terms of how the interface is going to work.
Material Design has been quickly adopted by Google across its core apps: Mail, Maps, Calendar, YouTube etc. Third party adoption, however, seems slow. I was able to find approximately 10 apps outside of Google that used the Material Design language. None of these apps were from major brands like Facebook, Uber or Amazon. Google may find it more difficult to dictate design to some of the larger app publishers. This is the weakness in the “guidelines” approach verses the Window Phone approach where it is very difficult to create an app that doesn’t utilize the Windows Phone design principles. Even with the guidelines, Google allows for limitless creativity in Android, Material Design or not.
If Google is able to convince app makers (and particularly the large publishers) to adopt Material, there are some big advantages. Material unifies the Google design language, but it also helps them standardize Android in a way that has been difficult in the past. Google’s first move in this area was Google Play Services; a separation of core Google apps like Gmail and Calendar from the Android operating system that brought a standardized experience in terms of Google apps across Android manufacturers. Google no longer needs to rely on an Android update to be able to tweak its core apps, but rather remotely update Google Play Services without the assent of the user or cellular carriers.
Material is the next step in the decoupling of Android from Google play. Opinions may vary about the level of differences between apps, but for me, Android definitely has more of an “all over the place” feel to it in comparison to iOS design. The difference could be caused by multiple factors. Perhaps Google understands its developer audience and thinks that they are not particularly design focused (vs. their iOS counterparts) or that Apple’s App Store guidelines are too draconian.
Thus, it makes sense for Google to provide a very specific design language to make it easier for its developer audience to create apps. No need to worry about what the interface should look like, just mock it up and skin it with Material.
Common Language: Reduce Fragmentation
Material provides another advantage for Google by reducing the appearance of fragmentation on the Android platform. If all top apps utilize the Material Design language, then it will provide a level of consistency that does not exist at the device level between custom skins and launchers from the Manufacturers. Samsung can keep TouchWiz, but the apps everyone interacts with will start to all have one consistent design and feel.
Here is another way to look at Material: Material is Google using developers to counter Samsung, LG and HTC’s efforts to add their own custom spin to Android.
Google implores potential Android buyers to, “Be together, not the same,” a campaign to promote Android as a brand independent of manufacturers without necessarily being subversive to Google’s partners. Material and the new ad campaign, combined with Google Play Services, will give Google more leverage in any push to get the original equipment manufacturers to utilize a more stock, streamlined version of Android. And, if successful, it may be less important for Google to get every manufacturer to use stock Android given that for most customers, the experience will be fairly close.
In this way, Material Design is like the backup plan to the now-defunct Android Silver program that was rumored to rollout in early 2015. In Android Silver, Google was said to partner with its top manufacturing partners like Samsung, HTC, Motorola and LG to build smartphones where Google more or less controlled the user interface and hardware guidelines for hero devices. Instead of a disparate group of smartphones with unique and confusing quirks for each manufacturer, the top Android Silver devices would be flagships under the manufacturers’ logos but built to Google’s desires. For the moment, Android Silver has been scrapped, but Material Design is a way to implement much of the same concepts.
Google now knows that Samsung et al. will continue to put a skin on Android as a way to differentiate in a increasingly commoditized product. But if Samsung figures to insist on its TouchWiz, it will look very out of place on a device where everything else is designed with Material.
The key to all of this is adoption of Material. We’ll be following the implementation in the few quarters and seeing if there are any gains.
Originally published at arc.applause.com on November 27, 2014.
