While Google’s Wear OS 3 weather experience is quite nice, the Android “app” is a bit more barebones and getting long in the tooth. Google Weather is now seeing a dark theme, but this might be an accident.
A month before rolling out widgets on Pixel phones, Weather finally got a Google Material Theme redesign. This was long overdue but came as everything else was getting updated to Material You.
Meanwhile, the experience, which is part of and updated by the Google app, lacked a dark theme. This wasn’t that noticeable on initial glance since the Froggy illustration takes up the entire screen. However, scrolling up or switching to the other tabs reveals the light background.
Curiously, after updating to the latest version of Android System Webview from the Play Store today, Google Weather has a dark theme that updates the search field, Current details, Precipitation, Wind, Sunrise & sunset, Tomorrow, and 10 days.
This is occurring on a Pixel running Android 13 (as well as 14), Google app beta 14.7.12.29, and Android System Webview 110.0.5481.65. We’re not seeing it on a Samsung device.
As glorious and long overdue as this is, the Google Weather dark theme is most likely a bug caused by the System Webview update rather than an intentional design change. Another point in that favor is how it now takes Google Weather a few more seconds to initially load. Meanwhile, as people have also noticed, you can’t swipe between the tabs, and have to tap underneath the search bar.
Hopefully, this will serve as motivation to actually overhaul Google Weather with a Material You redesign. At the very least, I really just want a dark theme for the current design.
More on Google Weather:
- Google Search weather card redesigned on mobile web
- Google releases new Weather app for all Wear OS 3 watches
- Google Weather app is now available on Android tablets
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