Google Unwraps Android 16 Details: Springier Animations, More Safeguards Against Scams

The feel-good news about Android 16 is a design concept intended to make Google’s mobile operating system feel bouncier and breezier. The feel-bad news is all the parts of Android 16 added to defend you against cheating, lying humans.

In past years, Google has saved its Android introductions for I/O, but this year it hosted an online event, The Android Show: I/O Edition, a week in advance of that developer conference. We got all the details at a press roundtables this week; here’s what’s next for Android.

We’re Living in a Material 3 Expressive World

Google’s pitch leads off with a new design vocabulary it calls Material 3 Expressive, the latest iteration on the “Material You” design it shipped in 2021’s Android 12. Google’s VP of Product and UX for Android Platform Mindy Brooks sums it up as “more fluid, natural and springy animations.”

These changes go beyond visual effects to include touch-feedback elements, like the “incredibly satisfying haptic rumble” when you dismiss a notification.

The new design language also opens new ways for apps in Android 16 to solicit your attention with real-time notifications of their work, in the form of lock-screen widgets and glanceable live-update notifications that may evoke Apple’s Dynamic Island. 

But as Google underscored when it outlined this feature for developers in the first beta release of Android 16, live updates are only for navigation, ride-hailing services, and delivery apps.  

Other changes in Android 16’s visual vocabulary aim to make this software and apps running on it fit better on the larger screens of foldable phones and Android tablets.

Android smartwatches get some attention in this release too, in the form of optimizations for round displays that increasingly set that part of the smartwatch market apart from Apple’s more-squared-off watches, plus the addition of color theming.

Brooks closed out the interface part of the roundtable with a nod to priorities: “We’re also making sure these updates are really performant and won’t drain your battery.” On that note, Google says Material 3 Expressive on Wear OS 6 “delivers up to 10% more battery life.”

Reality check: While Google’s apps should support these changes quickly (with the probable exception of the long-neglected Google Voice), third-party developers may not be equally enthused about the new look. And in the hands of phone vendors such as Samsung with a history of applying their own interface layers to Android, Material 3 Expressive may get remixed. 

Don’t Get Lost or Lied To

(Credit: Google)

While the new interface elements in Android 16 may leave you feeling a little warmer about the mobile-device experience, Google hopes the safety and security changes in this release have you feeling safer. Even if they also remind you of how many bad actors are lurking out there.

Android 16 expands on the assertive fraud detection shown off at I/O last year and rolled out this winter. For example, its on-device intelligence should now recognize more common scam-text patterns, such as bogus toll-road overdue-balance alerts. 

But in a recognition of how stressed-out humans can be bullied or scared into turning off basic defenses on their phone, Android will now lock out such system-security settings as disabling Play Protect app scanning, allowing app sideloading, or turning on abusable accessibility settings while you’re on a call. 

(Play Protect self-defense will be on for phones running Android versions as old as Android 6, while the others require Android 16.)

If you want to be sure that the person with whom you’ve been enjoying an end-to-end-encrypted chat in Google Messages or another secure messaging app, a new Key Verifier feature will let you verify that contact’s identity via public encryption keys. If Google has actually made that step relatively easy, it will represent a non-trivial advance over early encryption tools.

In a similar vein, Android 16 will let you turn on Google’s Advanced Protection mode as a device-level setting. 

Finally, the Find My Device app that helps locate devices on Google’s Find My network becomes Find Hub, adding support for more third-party trackers, the ability to locate people who shared their real-time location with you, and, later in May, support for ultra-wideband enabled trackers that allow much finer positioning.  

Google plans to add support for satellite connectivity later this year and enable integration with the luggage-tracking systems at Aer Lingus, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Iberia, and Singapore Airlines early next year.

In that last area, Google is catching up to Apple, which introduced a similar series of airline partnerships last December. But it does not appear that Android 16 will adopt two of Apple’s more recent privacy enhancements: requiring apps to get your permission before tracking your use of other apps and limiting an app’s contacts-list access to only designated names. 

Gemini Gloms on to More Devices

(Credit: Google)

Android 16 will complete the replacement of Google Assistant with Gemini Live, the no-subscription-needed chatbot offshoot of its Gemini AI platform. It brings that AI assistant to devices beyond phones, and not just to the watches that you might expect, but also to cars, TVs, and extended-reality headsets.

In the press roundtable, Google representatives emphasized that it won’t be the same Gemini in all these contexts and will also come with different requirements for connectivity. For example, the Gemini experience in Wear OS and Android Auto will require a data connection, said Guemmy Kim, senior director of product and UX for Android. But in cars with Google built-in such as Ford and Polestar, Gemini will offer limited offline support.

Gemini’s answers to spoken-word queries from drivers and passengers should also be shorter, although some of the sample questions shown off in the roundtable did not seem to be short-form material. For example: “Can you give me a quick rundown of the news today but leave out sports?” The touted support for translating messages may also lead to prolonged conversations with Gemini Live.

The car version of Gemini will come first to Android Auto in the coming months, then later this year to Google built-in.  

Gemini’s appearance in Google TV is also booked for sometime later in 2025, but it’s not clear which existing models will get updates. Android communications manager Kaori Miyake didn’t get into specifics when asked about that in the roundtable, although she did call out TCL as one of the vendors that Google has been working with. 

How Gemini will surface in Android XR, a platform that Google is building in collaboration with Samsung, remains unclear. For that and other aspects of Google’s software future, I/O itself–with a keynote starting at 10 a.m. Pacific on Tuesday, May 20–may offer more detail. 

[ For more curated Samsung news, check out the main news page here]

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