Android 12’s Big UI Changes Get a First Look

Prior to Google releasing Android 12 Developer Preview 1, we saw what were believed to be an early look at the new theme and UI changes for the next version of Android. Those first images were then followed by reporting that suggested we could see even more changes involving the notification area, lock screen, and system.

Now that this first Android 12 build is here, evidence to back all of those early reports up is surfacing. The folks at XDA were able to enable some of the changes to the lock screen and notifications area, all of which Google is still developing and hasn’t openly added to this first preview.

In this first set of screenshots you’ll get to see a work-in-progress lock screen setup that could eventually bring even more customizations to users.

You can see here that Google is experimenting with a new layout that puts the clock with a stacked format and a huge size when no notifications are present, while the weather and date have moved to the top left. Once a notification comes in or you play media, the clock then shrinks and shifts to the top right to make way for centered content.

It’s an interesting idea that brings the lock screen alive, plus there could be more clock options down the road for you to choose from if this stacked clock isn’t your thing.

The next reveal we have is of the notification area. As you can see here we still have both light and dark themes, although everything is very blue instead of dark or black at this early stage. We showed you the change to the dark theme in a write-up yesterday, but this looks even less dark.

This isn’t dramatically changed from the current Android 12 notification panel, but there are a couple of tweaks to point out. First, instead of being fully transparent in-between notification sections, this has a frosted look that we believe will eventually tint towards a color pulled from your wallpaper, once the wallpaper-based system theme goes live. The other thing to note is the thick-as-hell brightness bar.

And that’s mostly it for now because Google has hidden most of this stuff and it requires a bit of background magic to enable it. It’s also very much broken and still being worked on, so it’s not exactly something we should all try to use today. So far, I think it all looks very clean, though, and I’m excited to see where Google takes this.

// XDA