board inserted a Material 3 Expressive shortcuts redesign in January that is now seeing wider availability for beta users.
Update 05/26: Beta Gboard users starting with version 17.4 lost this shortcut redesign the day before. Stable users have not yet seen this renewal. Hopefully, this is a sign that Google is ready to widely roll out this update.
Original 5/18: Gboard previously used a grid layout for the shortcuts page. Each item was placed on a small rectangular card and the keyboard could be adjusted (made taller in Resize) to fit in a non-vertical scrolling view.
The Material 3 Expressive redesign puts everything on a rounded pad, with two shortcuts fitting into each row. Now swipe left to see the next page of tools.
Old versus new
The actual icons are unchanged, with the text labels significantly larger on the right. Unfortunately, some shortcut labels will be displaced because they don’t fit in the container.
You can tap the pencil icon to make edits with more M3 Expressive containers leveraged on the “Press and drag to customize” page.
Meanwhile, shortcuts in Gboard Suggestions remove their containers, with the back button replaced by a nearby ‘x’ in the top left corner.
This follows the Material 3 Expressive redesign of the Gboard settings page. Over the past week, this redesign has spread widely to beta users from Gboard (version 17.3). It doesn’t appear on the stable channel yet.
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