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This week’s top stories: Play Store Material You on tablets, At a Glance ridesharing, One UI 5 hands-on

Kyle Bradshaw | Jul 9 2022 - 12:00 pm PT

Google Play Store updated with Material You design

In this week’s top stories: Material You redesign begins appearing in the Play Store on tablets & Chromebooks, Pixel’s At a Glance preps ridesharing ETAs, we go hands-on with Samsung’s Android 13 based One UI 5, and more.

Ahead of a broader redesign announced at Google I/O, the Play Store has gotten some initial Material You tweaks on Chromebooks and Android tablets this week. Specifically, the search bar has been reshaped and the accent color now uses Material You’s dynamic colors, where available.

So far, Material You is not used anywhere else in the app. Looking ahead, users can expect a compact navigation rail and main feeds that show more than just wider carousels. Instead, side-by-side cards will be leveraged. It’s amusing how the look is rather different from the recently revamped website.

Throughout this year, Google has been steadily expanding the capabilities of the Pixel series’ At a Glance widget. The next addition, spotted by our APK Insight team, will display an ETA for when your ride share (Uber or Lyft) will arrive.

At the start of this week, we revealed a “Cross device timer” feature for At a Glance that would show what’s been set on your Smart Displays and Assistant speakers. Google has also been working on surfacing “Food delivery” information on your lock and homescreen since April.

As the official release of Android 13 gets closer, some have wondered how Samsung will use it to enhance its One UI skin. This week, our Max Weinbach went hands on with One UI 5, and was able to spot design tweaks and new features like copying text from Gallery images.

To provide some context, this build was provided by a source and is not one that Samsung has released publicly, so it might not provide a complete picture of One UI 5 given the initial nature. It is an early beta that unfortunately does not have a changelog, so everything new below has been from using One UI 5 and comparing to One UI 4.

With the most recent release of Nest cameras, Google now requires you to use the Google Home app to view and manage them. However, as our Ben Schoon points out, Google has done very little to actually make Google Home a suitable replacement to the classic Nest app.

As I’m writing this post, I can’t view footage from 6am from my Nest Camera with Floodlight without spending five minutes scrolling back and forth to get it to finally load, but I can easily from my older Nest Hello doorbell camera. They’re both connected to power, and both on the same Nest Aware plan with 24/7 recording. The only difference is the Home app’s terrible handling of recording history.

In Pixel news, Google has launched a new trio of “Curated Culture” wallpapers for the Pixel 3 and newer phones. These wallpapers show one portion of a larger piece of artwork, showing three adorable, sparkle-eyed frogs holding hands.

From the Google Weather app on Android to the Nest Hub clock face, the company has a strong affinity for frogs. Canonically, this is presumably not the Froggy — official name — we already know and love, but still pretty great.