Google’s Phone app might pick up some cues from Android 12’s lock screen

Shape-changing buttons coming to a Pixel’s dial pad near you

Recently spotted changes to Google’s Phone app (the default dialer app on Pixels) show some UI tweaks that could be upcoming. We aren’t sure if this tweaked layout was spotted in the wild or manually enabled somehow, but details indicate the dial pad itself will be tweaked to look and operate more like the Android 12 lock screen and Google’s calculator app, with shape-changing borders added around the pad’s buttons and new button-pressing animations.

According to the details shared so far by Esper.io’s Mishaal Rahman on Twitter (courtesy of @Nail_Sadykov, editor of the popular Google News Telegram channel), the in-development tweaks are light so far.

Left: “Old” Phone dial pad. Right: The new UI.

Colors, of course, vary according to the current device theme. Particulars like padding, font size, and bar height illustrated could come down to a difference in device DPI settings — we can’t be sure. But the immediately visible change is the addition of pill-shaped borders for the dial pad’s buttons, seemingly making use of Material You’s dynamic colors for their background. The numbers themselves were more brightly colored previously, but now they’re more monochromatic for a stronger contrast, particularly on the new lighter buttons.

Left: The “old” current animations in the Dialer app. Right: The new animations.

When tapping the numbers, animations have been changed to match the Calculator and Android 12’s lock screen keyguard, too, with the borders of the buttons changing shape when tapped to become more square-like before contracting back in. Previously, tapping buttons simply expanded a circle out from the center, which faded away.

Overall, the new buttons provide further enhanced contrast for the numbers on the dial pad, and contrast one of the explicitly stated goals of Material You’s dynamic theming.

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