1. It’s bland and boring. Why would you ever want all the apps on your phone to be the same color? I understand some amount of consistent theming and styling so you know what things are buttons, where to find certain settings, etc. But Material You pushes them all to use the same exact color theme. This makes it harder to distinguish between Messages, Chat, and every other messaging app that takes on the the Material You coloring. They’re all text, in the same font and color, on blobs that are the same color, with buttons that are all the same icon sets… Can I figure it out? Sure. But it all blends together. It’s bland. And soulless. It’s in a way “commoditizing” design and making everything samey. This is especially drastic after Material Pre-You was extremely heavy on color. Go look at all the old Material design stuff. Everything is vibrantly showing brand colors.

2. It’s dull. Holo was really dull. Material brought bright and saturated colors. Material You pushes back faded, low saturation, mushy, dull colors. Everything feels “dead”, especially in contrast.

3. Everything is the same squishy shapes. Android has a long history of things like app icons having distinct shapes and emphasis on outlines and sillouhettes. This is shoving back even harder on “everythijg is a circle or a squircle”

4. Pixel has absolutely butchered features and customization options in order to make way for… Pick a color?

5. Everything is fat and chunky. Buttons and margins are obscenely large. It feels childish. Material was sleek and efficient. You seems to take space for sake of taking space. It’s wasteful and dysfunctional. More stuff in the notification shade (like brightness) was pushed behind another swipe because they just don’t have space with all the quick settings having gobbled more space despite showing fewer shortcuts. This is just one example, but these things are everywhere.

6. Google does not take authoritarian control over app design of every app in their store. As such, devs take more time to update their apps. And so many apps just don’t bother for a while. This means every change comes at the cost of fragmentation. And Material You is explicitly pushing for further unification. So it’s inception is actively hurting its purpose. Case in point, skim through Googles own apps - they’re in varying states of migrated, so Googles own first party apps aren’t even consistent.

I understand this design could be appealing on paper, especially if you look at it in a vacuum. Objectively, it’s a pretty good design language. But Android’s previous design language was measurably better. It was objectively more efficient. So the people who have been using it blatantly are shown all the shortcomings. If you buy a new device with it, there’s no context and it seems decent. If you upgrade, tons of the things you use just disappear . Instantly. Which shows its problems much faster.

Google has literally walked backwards here. In many ways. And it’s half done, has problems, is bland, and blatantly less exciting and efficient than the thing it’s replacing.