Android 16’s Eventual Redesign Leaks In Latest Look 

Google has been working on a significant UI redesign of Android 16 that has leaked out in recent months, but has yet to appear and likely won’t make the initial stable release. 

Android Authority today enabled all the changes in the latest Android 16 beta and it looks pretty polished. 

Starting on the lockscreen, Google has moved At a Glance from the top-left corner to underneath the full-sized clock. When there are notifications, the day/date and weather appear to the right of the corner clock. There’s also an optional “compact notification shelf” that just shows notification icons in a pill instead of the full-width alert. You tap to get the notification shade. 

On the homescreen, the Pixel Launcher will let you customize app icons with your non-circle choices being: rounded “square,” “four-sided cookie,” “seven-sided cookie,” “arch,” and “complex clover.”

The status bar sees a new, bolded font for the clock at the left, while Google has refreshed the status icons at the right, including Wi-Fi, cellular, and battery, which has been rotated 90 degrees and shows the percentage inside.

Android 16 Quick Settings does not see the drastic split redesign that was previously leaked. It’s the same basic layout at this point, with pill-shaped QS Tiles when a setting is inactive. This morphs into a rounded rectangle with a touch of color when enabled. Meanwhile, the brightness slider is no longer pill-shaped and matches the latest Material 3 style. 

Light vs. dark theme

The Pixel is adopting blurred backgrounds with this Android 16 redesign. This includes the PIN pad over the lockscreen, Quick Settings, the app grid, and Recents multitasking. 

The new slider style is present in the volume slider, panel, and the media output switcher.

The Settings app sees a redesign with the main page now featuring colorful icons for each item, while the individual menu page houses everything in cards.  

Again, if this was debuting with the expected June stable release of Android 16, it would have probably gone live in recent betas. As such, this is presumably coming in one of the Android 16 QPRs later this year.

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