Gmail's settings page finally gets the Material 3 Expressive treatment

Gmail has spent years accumulating settings. The result is a list of toggles long enough that most people never scroll to the bottom of it, and that list has looked essentially unchanged while the rest of Google's Android apps moved on.

That is now changing. The settings redesign Android Authority first uncovered in October is reaching users, and it arrives with the full Material 3 Expressive styling that shipped alongside Android 16 — the version the earlier, manually enabled build did not have.

What actually changed

• Rounded cards instead of a flat list. Settings sit in cards, so related options read as one group rather than a dozen unrelated switches.
• Larger touch targets and expressive switches. Small controls in a dense list are a mis-tap waiting to happen; the new layout gives each row room.
• Grouped sections. Smart Compose, Smart Reply and Proofread now live together under Writing assistance, while Chat and Meet each get a dedicated section instead of being scattered.
• Icons that mean something. Each category carries a colourful icon, so you can find the right area without reading every line.

The screenshots circulating were captured on Gmail version 2026.11.02.1020540846.Release, which gives you a concrete way to check whether your device has it yet.

It is not happening in isolation

Settings screens for the Google app, Gemini and Google Messages have all been redesigned along the same lines. Google is normalising its own UI against the system design language, which is a quiet but meaningful change: when every Google app has the same visual grammar, hunting for a setting stops being a per-app skill.

Worth doing once

When the new layout reaches you, take two minutes to walk through the sections Google just reorganised. Gmail's defaults are reasonable but not universal — the writing-assistance suite in particular is worth checking if you care whether Google drafts your replies. And if you use a modded Gmail variant, note that this rollout is server-and-version gated, so a modded build will typically lag the official app by at least one release.

Source: Android Authority — Gmail's Material 3 Expressive settings redesign