Chrome is getting ready for Android 12’s Material You and more

We are a few months away from Android 12 rolling out, the stable build, and Google is currently working on updating its apps to fall in line with Android 12’s Material You design language. Google has added a new flag to Chrome 90 on Android that brings in a small Material You-inspired design change to Chrome’s overflow menu. Besides that, Chrome for Android is also getting support for Android 12’s “bouncy scrolling”.

As reported by Android Police, the new #theme-refactor-android” flag in Chrome 90 gives the app’s overflow menu a slight design upgrade. The ‘facelift’ is not all that significant but you can see that the “rounded corners of the overflow menu fall in line with all the Material You design changes” that we’ve seen on Android 12 Beta. It’s highly likely that Google is going to introduce more such flags over the next few months to get the Chrome UI to fall in line with the Material You guidelines. If you are interested in checking this out yourself, you can go to chrome://flags and look for the #theme-refactor-android flag and enable it. You then have to relaunch the browser twice for the changes to show up.

Besides this, Google is also adding support for Android 12’s bouncy scrolling feature on Chrome for Android. This was first spotted by XDA Developers in Android 12 DP3 earlier this year and is an overscroll animation. This overscroll animation replaces the current inkwell-style animation that you can see once when you are scrolling right now and reach the bottom of the page.

According to 9to5Google, Chrome on Android is soon going to receive support for this new bouncy/elastic scrolling animation on devices running Android 12. They have spotted a recent code change added to Chromium regarding this. The description states - “Android 12 and higher have a new visual behavior for overscroll which stretches the scrolling content. This patch uses the elastic overscroll flag to enable this behavior on Android”.

The report adds that new animation style might be hidden behind an experimental flag on chrome://flags and also that the code change does not mention anything about it being restricted to Android 12 only. So it is possible this might come to older versions of Android as well.