Google Play prepares for a design change that was already long in coming

Google Play is the application store present in almost all mobile phones sold in Spain (with the exception of Huawei), a store that thanks to the benefit of coming pre-installed is the most widespread, although this does not mean that you should relax before any rival . Even less knowing that in future versions of Android installing third-party stores will be more accessible than ever.

While functionality is very important in this type of product, design is undoubtedly the key pillar in the user experience and is what invites us to spend hours discovering applications, movies or books. In the latest tests it seems that one of the most traditional elements of Android disappears, which is known as the hamburger menu.

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Google Nexus S, with the traditional Android 11 buttons in 2011.

It was 2011, a time when Android was still a long way from being what we know now. Most mobiles had large frames on the front and on many occasions these were used by physical or tactile buttons. At that time, the usual thing was to find four buttons known as Home, Back, Menu and Search. At the end of the year, everything changed forever with Android 4.0Ice Cream Sandwich, the first mobile version to integrate the buttons on the screen, keeping only two of these four and adding a third button that today we know as multitasking.

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One of the fixes in the Android design lines at that time to solve the absence of menus ended up being theburger menu

, an element that would expand a little later with the arrival of Android 5.0 and the design line that we know as Material Design. A button located in the upper left corner that when pressed showed us a drop-down menu loaded with options and that is still valid today.

Left: Current Google Play design | Right: New design in Google Play tests.

However, as we said when mobile phones without frames began to appear, this element stopped making sense because it was less and less accessible. Little by little we have seen how it began to gradually disappear in various applications, sometimes with great execution, and it seems that at last it is time to say goodbye in the application store.

As we see in Android Police, Google is already experimenting with removing the button in its app store. Google’s arrangement is perhaps not the most ideal in this circumstance, since what was found in a hidden menu in the upper left corner is now found in a button located in the upper right corner, but as it is not displayed by sliding, at least does not incur with Android 10 gestures.

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The Google Play entry is preparing for a design change that was already long in coming appears first in The Free Android.