A couple of weeks ago at Google’s annual developer conference I/O 2018, Google introduced its new design approach to Material Design, simply called Material Design Refresh. The guidelines now allow developers more freedom in their app design, opening the rules up for more individual corporate design and more derivations from the strictly defined principles Material Design used to enforce. The new language is clearly an evolution, not a revolution. Most of the guidelines were slightly updated to create a more organic look in favor of the playful look with over-the-top animations Google‘s design is known for. These animations, however, seem to have vanished altogether.

I must make a distinction here. Of course, Google talked about new animations for their Material Design Refresh. Those are collected and showcased on Material Design’s website, Material.io, where they appear in different sections and best practice examples. There is a whole section dedicated to navigation transitions or another site that finickily describes the speed and motion animations should adhere to.

Here, the evolution of the design language is extremely evident. Some transitions that were part of the first iteration of Material Design are now filed under „Don’ts“, the section for bad practices. Still, overall, it is evident that Google’s designers still put a high emphasis on transitions. The transitions were originally praised as a form of making interactions with phone, tablets, computers, and software, in general, more natural. After all, “material” design originates from the idea that layers in software resemble sheets of paper that sit on top of each other. Google beautifully displayed these ideas first in their concept arts on Google I/O 2014, where we saw the first iteration of Material Design.

In the above video, we can see Google’s designers’ original vision for Material Design. There is no stuttering, the app reacts instantaneously to touch and gives the user a feeling for where they are when they navigate through the app.

In practice, the implementation looks different. Still, Google has always tried to include animations in their apps to showcase how Material Design could look all over the OS and the web. Indeed, the language was broadly adopted by many Android developers. But lately, more and more inconsistencies become apparent in Google‘s approach. It seems as though they don‘t put all due effort into animation anymore.

Let‘s take a look at just two apps for now: Google Play Music and the Google Play Store.

We see a lot of stuttering and many performance problems in an app that shouldn’t be too heavy to load since the only thing that needs to be reloaded are the album covers and interpret photos. (Fair enough, I’m using a phone from 2015. But bear with me, you’ll see why that doesn’t matter). Maybe these problems arise because of the transitions? Are they just too heavy on the processor? My theory rather is, those transitions are hard to implement. Google doesn‘t spend resources on fine-tuning the code anymore. There are lots of other well-designed music players available that use animations and don‘t have these problems.

In the Google Play Store app, there are even more of these animation problems:

While transitioning, the corresponding app icons wildly change sizes and stutter significantly and get pushed to the wrong part of the screen. Just a few versions earlier, this wasn‘t the case. This seems like something that could easily be fixed by hunting down some bugs since it worked perfectly fine before.

Instead of improving on the current situation and fixing the code, Google seems to have settled on reducing animations significantly. Here’s a look of one of the latest Google apps to receive a Material Refresh makeover, YouTube Music.

As we can see in the video, there aren‘t any transitions from screen to screen. This leaves a jarring experience when moving around the interface. The lack of animation throws the user from one screen to another without any sense of relation between the two. True, the app feels very snappy and instantaneous to the touch. As soon as you hit an icon or the back button, the app reacts and brings you where you want to get to. Still, this is not how Material Design should work according to the guidelines (And there are ways to achieve this feeling and still have animated transitions. More on that later).

Let me quickly follow this up with the animations in another Material Refresh app, Google News.

Interestingly, both of these apps use some animations in their transitions. Most animations, however, are used for scrolling or static content, like the topical card stories in Google News, which can be scrolled through horizontally. Thus, animations are not completely gone in these new apps, they are just reduced and toned down.

The reason behind this may very well be that Google wants to speed up their app development. When they don’t spend too much time on fine tuning the animations in every single app, it is easier to move faster and release more apps and more feature-laden updates.

However, these animations are an important part to build Android’s design language. Since Google tries to push developers towards a recognizable, connected “same but different” design on Android, they should be the ones leading this effort. They should show other developers what the best practices are around designing apps and how a company can build a recognizable, logic and fun-to-use app.

There are other developers who pick up this role for themselves, realizing apps that adhere to their own specific needs and still fit into the broad idea of Material Design. A great example for a pre-refresh Material Design app is ARD Audiothek, a podcast app that bundles all of the German public radio broadcaster’s spoken offerings.

The app flies through the animations and uses logical transitions from any one screen to another. It manages to do that although its content and underlying infrastructure is very similar to Google Play Music: it downloads covers and pictures on the fly which are instantly inserted into the UI. This shows us two things: For one, good app performance is not a question of having the latest and greatest smartphone (as it runs smoothly on my three-year-old Nexus 6P). Second, apps just need some amount of optimization to achieve that, and they can indeed achieve that.

The problem probably lies behind the sheer size of Google as a company and their engineering incentive structures. Starting new projects or apps is rewarded higher at Google than just maintenance and optimizing existing apps. A promotion is much more likely for individual developers who build a new successful product than for someone who spends all their time fixing bugs and optimizing a product. Since apps are functional even with a bad or questionable UI, it can quickly become the last thing to pay attention when rushing to publish an app.

In this regard, it’s great that Google at least takes the time to create and explain design guidelines. This alone gives their developers (and other developers, too) an incentive to build great looking apps and highlights the importance of design and user experience overall.

After all, Android design has come a long way. Comparing the most recent Android 8.1 with a build from the 4.x era (or earlier) makes this very clear. Now Google needs to move this focus on design from the OS itself to the apps to create a truly unifying and wholesome user experience, where all parts of the user experience interlock.