Posted by Ivy Knight, Senior Design Advocate, Android

We’re thrilled to announce major updates to our design resources, giving you the comprehensive guidance you need to create polished, adaptive Android apps across all form factors! We now have Desktop Experience guidance and a refreshed Android Design Gallery.

New Desktop Experience Design Guidance

Your users are engaging with Android apps on more diverse devices than ever before—from phones and foldables to laptops and external monitors. A “desktop experience” occurs anytime your app is in a desktop-like mode, typically involving a non-touch input device like a keyboard or mouse, or another display such as a monitor (read more in the connected display announcement). This means designing for larger screens and accommodating additional input states. These new design experiences are meant to maximize productivity for your users with higher information density, multi-tasking capabilities.

Dive into desktop experience guidance to help optimize your app with desktop design principles, input interaction guidance, and system UI considerations.

The new guidance includes foundational guides where you can learn design principles that make desktop experiences unique, such as how multitasking is at the core of desktop experiences.

When your app is in a desktop experience, keep in mind crucial interaction experiences, such as how to best design around unique input interactions, like choosing cursors from system provided cursors.

For specialized actions not covered by system icons, consider creating a custom cursor icon, while ensuring it remains easy for users to find on the page.

A desktop experience brings more multitasking features, like windowing, so expect your app to take on a variety of dimensions with a header bar.

Desktops have much larger screens than mobile, and users typically interact using a mouse which has finer precision than a finger on a touch screen. This means you can present a UI with higher information density so your users can be more productive!

Want to get started quickly? Check out the walkthrough to go from mobile to desktop and design along with the updated Adaptive Design lab. 

For more on criteria that makes a differentiated quality app, read the newly updated adaptive app quality guidelines and adaptive developer guidance.

Introducing the Android Design Gallery

Looking for inspiration? We’ve launched the Android Design Gallery! This new resource is a living catalog of inspirational examples across multiple verticals, form factors, and UX patterns. We’ll be continually adding new inspirational examples, so check back often to see the latest and greatest in Android design.

Posted by Ivy Knight – Senior Design Advocate

Here’s your guide to the essential Android Design sessions, resources, and announcements for I/O ‘25:

Check out the latest Android updates

The Android Show: I/O Edition

The Android Show had a special I/O edition this year with some exciting announcements like Material Expressive!

Learn more about the new Live Update Notification templates in the Android Notifications & Live Updates for an in-depth look at what they are, when to use them, and why. You can also get the Live Update design template in the Android UI Kit, read more in the updated Notification guidance, and get hands-on with the Jetsnack Live Updates and Widget case study.

Make your apps more expressive

Get a jump on the future of Google’s UX design: Material 3 Expressive. Learn how to use new emotional design patterns to boost engagement, usability, and desire for your product in the Build Next-Level UX with Material 3 Expressive session and check out the expressive update on Material.io.

Stay up to date with Android Accessibility Updates, highlighting accessibility features launching with Android 16: enhanced dark themes, options for those with motion sickness, a new way to increase text contrast, and more.

Catch the Mastering text input in Compose session to learn more about how engaging robust text experiences are built with Jetpack Compose. It covers Autofill integration, dynamic text resizing, and custom input transformations. This is a great session to watch to see what’s possible when designing text inputs.

Thinking across form factors

These design resources and sessions can help you design across more Android form factors or update your existing experiences.

Preview Gemini in-car, imagining seamless navigation and personalized entertainment in the New In-Car App Experiences session. Then explore the new Car UI Design Kit to bring your app to Android Car platforms and speed up your process with the latest Android form factor kit.

Engaging with users on Google TV with excellent TV apps session discusses new ways the Google TV experience is making it easier for users to find and engage with content, including improvement to out-of-box solutions and updates to Android TV OS.

Want a peek at how to bring immersive content, like 3D models, to Android XR with the Building differentiated apps for Android XR with 3D Content session.

Plus WearOS is releasing an updated design kit @AndroidDesign Figma and learning Pathway.

Tip top apps

We’ve also released the following new Android design guidance to help you design the best Android experiences:

In-app Settings

Read up on the latest suggested patterns to build out your app’s settings.

Help and Feedback

Along with settings, learn about adding help and feedback to your app.

Widget Configuration

Does your app need setup? New guidance to help guide in adding configuration to your app’s widgets.

Edge-to-edge design

Allow your apps to take full advantage of the entire screen with the latest guidance on designing for edge-to-edge.

Check out figma.com/@androiddesign for even more new and updated resources.

Visit the I/O 2025 website, build your schedule, and engage with the community. If you are at the Shoreline come say hello to us in the Android tent at our booths.

We can’t wait to see what you create with these new tools and insights. Happy I/O!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2025 updates on io.google starting May 22.