Android 13 & 12L
Expanding Android's design system to tablets and foldables; refining Material You.
Android 12L expanded Android's new design system into tablet and foldable form factors, with a focus on multitasking and productivity use cases.
Android 13 brought features that enhance the user experience across visual and motion design. Customization stayed a core emphasis, theming improved alongside an evolved Material You, and the updated media player and spatial audio made listening more immersive. Quality was another big focus: polishing UI details and refining animations and transitions across all of the main feature areas.
As design lead for the Motion team, my team owned the details across the core surfaces: a far more precise theme picker, the redesigned media player (album art theming, an animated playback wave, a bigger volume slider with quick output switching), plus the new lock-screen clock, a refined unlock animation, a more reachable settings shortcut, and the updated gesture bar. Small details that add up to real quality of life; MKBHD walks through them in his Android 13 review.