As Android encourages apps to go edge-to-edge, Phone by Google has been updated with a transparent status bar.
Top comment by Austin
I swear at one point the phone app DID support a transparent status bar, but it broke years ago and they never bothered fixing it.
I really don't care for Apple or their products but I really wish Google would match their QA and level of detail on first party apps. Design is all over the place, there's no consistency in style or quality.
Until recently, the call screen featured a black status bar that could be quite jarring depending on your Dynamic Color theme.
Google made the status bar transparent around version 128 (when Audio Emoji started rolling out in late April). The change, which users noticed today, might have occurred slightly earlier than that, but it was still solid as of late March. This is the case on both Android 14 and 15.
The transparent bar is a small but nice quality-of-life improvement for the Google Phone app.
Meanwhile, apps targeting API level 35 (once finalized next month) “are displayed edge-to-edge by default on Android 15 devices.” At I/O 2024, Google encouraged developers to go this route and make sure everything is compatible. The Android team cited how “an internal Google user study found that users significantly prefer edge-to-edge screens over non edge-to-edge screens” as they result in a “more satisfying and premium” experience.
More on Google Phone:
- Audio Emoji in Pixel Phone app widely rolling out
- Google Phone app removes Nearby places search
- Google Phone app starts showing WhatsApp calls, new video call shortcut for some
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