Google’s Material You redesign promised to inject more personality into its apps

Think bold colors, fluid shapes, and adaptive typography. But the result feels less like thoughtful design and more like it can’t sit still.

Take the Clock and Phone apps, for example. Both have received dramatic visual updates, but not necessarily for the better. Users are reporting oversized layouts that feel more distracting than dynamic. Even worse? The numbers literally jitter. Every time the seconds change in the stopwatch or timer, digits shudder and shift due to the variable-width font Google chose.

Then there’s the layout itself. On some devices, the word “Stopwatch” no longer fits on a single line, causing the “h” to awkwardly drop down. Basic controls are now often scattered, forcing users to scroll to find buttons that used to be immediately accessible. And if you have bold text enabled in your system settings, these spacing and alignment issues become even more obvious.

The Phone app seems to fare slightly better, though its new pill-shaped slider has also drawn criticism—especially since it moves horizontally instead of vertically, going against most users’ muscle memory for swiping.

Frustration is mounting. Complaints have flooded platforms like Reddit, X, and Google’s own support forums, complete with video evidence of the shaky text and layout glitches. Google has since acknowledged the problem via its Pixel Community account, promising a fix—though without sharing a specific timeline.

Now, the Expressive design is rolling out to an even bigger stage: Google Chrome. This marks a critical moment for Material You, as any flaws will now affect one of the most widely used apps in the world.

The new design recently moved out of Chrome’s experimental Canary channel and into the stable version, suggesting Google is confident it’s ready. The changes are certainly noticeable: the progress bar now has rounded corners, key menu icons are enclosed in circles, and the tab interface has been reorganized with colored tab groups and updated Incognito mode branding.

But the question remains: is it stable? Or will it, too, suffer from the jittery behavior and layout issues that have plagued other apps? With Material You spreading further each day, all eyes are on Google to deliver a design that’s not just expressive—but also polished.