Material 3 Expressive

Have a look at the linked https://m3.material.io/blog/building-with-m3-expressive to get a better impression of what this is about. From the guidelines given there, many parts of the design make sense and will help designs work better - grouping objects properly, be aware of contrast to highlight important elements, more options for good typography (instead of basically none, Android/Material offered nothing by default), helpers for highlighting buttons etc. It's also still simply a good idea to focus on good animations that actually work for the UI, instead of being superfluous baggage, and then to make them feel nice. I'm not saying it's groundbreaking, but it's helpful to have something like this as an official guideline, and be it to reign in rogue designers.

But it's still a flat design, and thus does not properly transport clickability. And their weird approach for the color schemes still leads to an ugly mess, pastel with weird contrasts and color combinations that just are ugly. I haven't seen a proper analysis what's going on there, but it sucks. Also, this whole design system is very far from leading to a consistent system, but that seems to be a non-goal, just some standard component building blocks are there to foster familiarity.

Better than nothing and probably a step up, but M3E doesn't convince me totally so far.

And toggled / disabled states. With mobile’s lack of hover, it’s often a game of trial and error to figure out what’s even interactable.

> And their weird approach for the color schemes still leads to an ugly mess, pastel with weird contrasts and color combinations that just are ugly.

It looks like a poster for a party. To extrapolate, it feels like the lineage is digital marketing, especially video centric content on mobile-exclusive byte sized attention-scape. This style draws less attention to your options (what you can do), and more towards content (what’s provided for you). It’s reduced decision making, highlighting the happy/desired path even more. No wonder it scores higher in user testing - it requires less thinking IF you take the happy path.

I’d imagine it works great for simple commercial products with single call to actions. But for apps (not posters) it leaves a lot on the table.

The toggle switch is one of the worst UI conventions to come out of mobile IMO and I get irrationally irate when I see it in desktop UIs with a mouse and keyboard.

A simple checkbox would have done just fine, we've those since forever, and they clearly convey either an on or off state.

Nope, not good enough, we need a toggle switch. Which color or direction is on or off? Who knows, because everyone implements it differently.