Google hasn’t necessarily done the best job of updating their apps to Material Design, but we do have some good news on that front today. Today Google is rolling out an update to the Google Play Newsstand app that adds some more Material Design UI. Google Play Newsstand received its big Material Design overhaul last month but there were a few UI features that were not quite updated to Material Design. Today that will change for the most part.
The update to Google Play Newsstand that is rolling out today will update quite a few UI features to the Material Design style, most notably, the refresh animation. Before today’s update, if you pulled down the page it would show the old horizontal refresh animation that Android has had for awhile now, but now it shows the much nicer Material Design circular arrow refresh animation. The first change you will probably notice though is the more colorful pop-up cards that now feature full color backgrounds for the entire card as opposed to the top 60% like before, again following Material Design guidelines, something we have also recently seen inside of Google Play Games and Gmail 5.0.
As you dig deeper into Google Play Newsstand you will notice smaller changes that all together make the app appear much more refined and polished. For instance, your selection in the hamburger menu will now appear blue, whereas before it would remain black. Also, the option to for “Downloaded only” has been moved from the drop-down menu to the hamburger menu. And last but not least, when you are searching for something the magnifying glass is much more prevalent and bold, a nice little touch.
This is a great update to see, Google needs to get all of their apps updated completely to Material Design and we are sure that they will. We are definitely going to see a lot of updates to Google’s apps over the next week or so as Lollipop and Nexus devices get into users hands starting tomorrow. This is going to be an exciting ride and things are going to be very interesting for the rest of 2014 as many flagship devices such as the HTC One M8 and LG G3 get updated to Android Lollipop.
