Over the past few years, we’ve seen how Google had made changes to the Android UI, tweaking it throughout the course of its existence. For the most part the design has never really be a radical departure from previous builds, and at most just features new eye candy, changes in font, color scheme, and so on.
However at the same time it did feel that despite Android being a Google product, its design never really felt like it was part of Google. Well Google is apparently hoping to change that by unifying their designs across the board. According to Android Police, Google is rumored to be working on a new UI paradigm called Quantum Paper.
Quantum Paper is the name of a new unified design that will supposedly help to make Google’s UI consistent across the board. What this means is that when you use your Android phone, you can expect a similar-ish UI to when you use Google’s other products on the web, like Gmail, Search, Drive, Calendar, and so on. In fact as you can see in the image above, it looks like Google could be planning on unifying the design on iOS devices as well.
Despite Google and Apple being rivals in the mobile space, it seems that Google will not be treating iOS users as second class citizens and will include them in the unification process as well. Whether or not this jars with Apple’s own design language remains to be seen. In fact Google has been slowly incorporating Quantum Paper in the latest build of Android.
For those who have updated to Android 4.4.3, you might have noticed that your dialer app looks significantly different from before. Earlier leaked screenshots of Gmail also showed signs of a similar-ish design, along with Google+. It’s good to see Google trying to unify their design across the board, kind of like what Apple is doing with iOS devices, and to a certain extent OS X as well, but what do you guys think?