Google has been tweaking its popular apps over the past few months to align them with the refreshed Material guidelines. After showing signs of a refresh not too long ago, Google’s dialer and messaging apps are now picking up the new outlined icons with their latest beta releases. These rather subtle changes merely replace the existing filled iconography and do not introduce any new functionality whatsoever.

Left: Old, Right: New

Left: Old, Right: New

The icons around the text field in Messages got replaced in July, so we’re not going to get into them. What’s new here are the ones up top that turned hollow after the update. The Start chat bubble on the homepage also shed its old icon for an outlined one, as compared in the images above.

Left: Old, Right: New

Google’s Phone app also received a similar treatment as part of the newest beta release, spotted first in a separate leak concerning its call recording feature. The entire call screen has been facelifted with new icons (shown above), along with other elements in the app navigation menu and the search bar (shown below).

Left: Old, Right: New

This icon refresh appearing in beta is indicative of an oncoming broader availability with a future stable release. Until that happens, you’ll need to bump the apps to beta v44 for Phone and v5.5 for Messages if you’re rocking their stable versions. You have the option to join their respective beta programs directly from the Play Store or download Phone's APK from APK Mirror. We expect the Messages APK to go live soon on our sister site.

Google Messages (beta): Play Store

Google Phone (beta): Play Store, APK Mirror

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.dialer