Material is a well known cross-platform design system made by Google. It looks pretty good in web apps, but mobile apps is where it really shines. Recently, Google had released a third iteration of its Material system for Android and I decided to give it a go in one of my apps. The first impressions are pretty good so far. It looks cleaner and more lightweight. Also, I’m glad it remained as fast as the previous version. Unlike Jetpack Compose, native Material components are actually usable and don’t take my phone many seconds to load.

One of the most distinctive features of Material 3 is user-customizable color palette. I hope it will push some mobile apps towards using less brand colors. Seriously, people hate not being in control, and not allowing them to override colors seems like a bad idea. I removed all the custom colors from my app, and I have a good feeling about it. At least, no one complained yet, but we’ll see how it goes. I didn’t actually test it on a real device yet, but I will soon be able to play with this theme on Pixel 6. I tested it on the latest emulator images though, but they’re both terribly broken and thus not representative.