Following the initial rollout for some beta users last week, Google shared more details about the Phone app’s upcoming Material 3 Expressive redesign, including a big revamp of bottom bar navigation.
In addition to the “visual style updates,” Google is reorganizing app navigation and the bottom bar. Voicemail is the only holdover at the end, with the dedicated Favorites tab gone and replaced by a “Favorites bar” in the new “Home” tab, previously called Recents. Meanwhile, the Contacts tab/list has been removed.
Instead, you have a new “Keypad” tab at the center that replaces the FAB (floating action button). As such, the app is down to three tabs in the bottom bar.
Google also touts a simplified or “flattened” call log so that “calls from the same person aren’t nested under a single entry.” The goal is to “make it easier to quickly understand your call history as a single chronological list, as opposed to navigating into each contact to view prior missed or answered calls.”
Finally, Google says the redesigned incoming call UI with its “horizontal swipe-to-answer/decline gesture” is “preferred [based on user feedback] for avoiding accidental declines and answers while taking the phone out of one’s pocket.”
The goal of these three functional updates is to make the “end-to-end app experience easier to navigate and use.”
This bottom bar redesign and other Phone by Google updates are gradually rolling out to the public beta group over the coming weeks. You might have some features, like the M3E redesign, but not the other updates just yet.
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