Google’s Weather app is nice and informative, pulling data from weather.com to paint a thorough picture of the forecast, but its UI hasn’t seen much attention since its inception. Sure, it picked upa slipshod dark mode earlier this year, but that was mostly a result of a change to Android’s underlying WebView system. Now, it appears a full redesign is imminent.
Android expert and Android Police contributorMishaal Rahman has receivedseveral user reports that the new Material You redesign for Google’s Weather app is rolling out. None of the devices we’ve tested on have access to the new UI yet, so the rollout is still likely in its very early stages at this point, but it appears to be underway.
You can see in the Twitter thread that additional users have since reported receiving the updated interface, and Rahman notes that seven users in total have confirmed the rollout to him with screenshots. Previously, Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet users had been able to access the updated UI, but now it appears to be rolling out to phones as well — even non-Google devices, indicating that the redesign will thankfully not be Pixel-exclusive.
The redesigned Google Weather interface on the Pixel Tablet
Google’s Weather app isn’t an app in the strictest sense — it’s more an applet included with the main Google app, which means that it’s available on almost any Android phone — all you have to do is search for the word “weather,” then tap theHourly, humidity, wind and morebutton to open it, or you can add the widget to your home screen for faster access. As with most things involving its flagship app, Google has already added the code for this change and is simply using a server-side switch to activate the flag that controls it on some accounts.
We had previously spotted this redesign in development, noting that it features afully transparent navigation bar when enabled on phones. This would mark the first significant design shift sinceGoogle Weather added tablet support over a year ago, though for the most part, the app has featured the same overall design from its inception until now.
Meanwhile, Google is in the process ofredesigning its At a Glance widget, which is how many users access the Weather UI. Once that rolls out, which we expect to happen soon, the widget will ditch its transparent background in favor of a light or dark backdrop and funMaterial Youshapes.
Since the Weather app’s redesign is controlled by an account-based change, there’s likely nothing you can do if you’re not seeing it, aside from waiting. But you could try your luck at installing thelatest version of the Google Search app from APKMirror, and you can also switch accounts in the top-right corner of the old Weather interface to see if it’s available on a different Google account that you can access.
