This is the new Android logo

Android is getting a new logo and typeface, in its first major rebranding exercise since 2019.

This was confirmed to 9to5Mac, which did some sleuthing around a new-look Android logo that has started to pop up on occasion this year.

What’s the difference? For the past few years, the Android label would often be accompanied by a flat, green Android head. That head is staying, but it now has a 3D-rendered appearance.

The Android font is changing, too. Since 2014, Android has been written in lower-case font in the logo design. But a capital “A” is coming, as are the super-rounded “n” and “r” characters from the 2014 revision of Google’s branding.

Who cares? iPhone fans may not, but Android owners are likely to see this new logo a lot once it spreads across the Google ecosystem.

It also seems to be a partial rejection of the ethos Google established back in 2014, called Material Design.

This made the Android software much flatter and cleaner-looking, in an attempt to give it more of the polish Apple’s iPhone iOS software was known for at the time.

It worked, so why is Google bringing back a more three-dimensional look in 2023?

We’re going to have to don our speculation hats for this one, but there is one clear reason to point to. Earlier this year, during a Samsung Unpacked launch event, an “XR” collaboration between Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm was teased.

This means we are likely to see a new Samsung VR headset announced this year or next, one that uses Google software.

Google used to be quite keen on VR, having explored it in Google Cardboard and Google Daydream, which let you use your phone as the screen of a VR headset. However, support for Daydream was dropped in 2019.

A return to this area of tech makes sense when Apple has already announced its Vision Pro headset, due out in 2024. When you’re dealing with a 3D-operating system, like that of a VR headset, it makes sense to have an Android logo that can be rendered in three dimensions without looking odd.

A much smaller leap of logic is to assume this branding will take over properly with the introduction of Android 14, due for release in August 2023.

Android has gone through three key branding eras since it was launched to the public in 2008. First, there was the deliberately futuristic-looking font of 2018-2014, which you can think of as Android’s nerd era.

The look was softened significantly in 2014 with Material Design. And the typeface became even more ordinary in 2019, along with a ditching of the “bugdroid” Android mascot in favour of just a little headpiece.

Still, for our money, the most memorable Android branding elements were the dessert-named system updates, which lasted from the system’s early days to 2018’s Android 9.0 Pie. Remember these?

Did you know Google continues to use dessert-based internal codenamed for its updates? Android 13 is Tiramisu, even if none of us know the software by its sweet alter ego any more.