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Google Discover is testing a curious design change

Pabio November 3, 2024

Google Discover may be getting an overhaul with individual cards for each item and no line separators for topics.
The redesign also includes larger images, a new card type for suggested topics, and some inconsistencies, like the two overflow menus.
These changes are part of the latest beta version of the Google app and are not widely available at this time.

Google Discover is available on most Android Phones on the market today. It’s a useful tool to help you keep up to date with the day’s top news stories or other topics of interest. This customizable experience is available through the Google app as well as on the Android home screen. Discover isn’t one of those Google products that sees a lot of updates or changes, with the last big change we encountered being underdevelopment. Research updates feature, which has not yet been widely deployed. Google is currently experimenting with some Material You design changes for topics that appear on Discover.

The current look and feel of the Discover feed has remained largely unchanged for some time now. But with this Material You redesign spotted for the first time by 9to5Googleeach element has its own card, which means that the horizontal line separating the content is also gone.

Current and upcoming

The images accompanying each Discover item are also noticeably larger, while the dedicated share and save buttons are no longer available on the map. Instead, they are now inside the solitary overflow menu button. It’s obvious that Google is going for a cleaner design here, even if it’s not quite perfect everywhere.

What are these two overflow menus?

Current and upcoming

In addition to these design tweaks for Discover elements, a new card type is also in the works that will suggest a relevant topic and provide a more conveniently located button to add it. What’s strange about this card, however, is that it has two overflow menu buttons (pictured below). It’s unclear whether both menus serve the same purpose, although Google will likely remove one of them in a future update.

What’s also new in these screenshots is the presence of only three bottom bar tabs. Home, ResearchAnd Registeredwith the Notifications the existing version tab disappears. These changes are reportedly rolling out to Discover with the beta version of the Google app. v15.43although it is now only available to a small group of users.

It’s worth remembering that Google regularly experiments with design changes, although not all of them make it to the stable version. This also means that we don’t have a timeline for when these changes will appear on the stable version of the Google app.