With the arrival of Android 12L, Google doubled down on its commitment to tablets, especially in the lead up to the Pixel Tablet. While there are plenty of apps optimized specifically for the top Android tablets on the market, the search giant has lately been focused on making its first-party apps suitable for the big-screen experience. In line with that, Google has tweaked the Discover feed to better utilize the ample screen space on tablets.
In the last few months, many Google apps have picked up tablet-specific features. For instance, Slides, Drive, and Keep now support drag and drop for photos, which comes in handy when two apps are open in split view. The Play Store for tablets got a compact navigation drawer on the side, and so did the Discover feed via the Google app more recently. The latter is now getting even more UI optimizations for tablet screens.
Instead of two columns of suggested posts, your Discover feed will now have a three-column layout in landscape mode, as spotted by 9to5Google. This interface choice wastes no white space around the main content and uses the larger tablet screen efficiently to show more articles in the same available space. The feed will still switch to the two-column layout when you hold the tablet in portrait mode.
Additionally, Google Discover now shows each article within its own card, making it look neater, especially in dark mode like in the example screenshots above. The app plays with the height of these cards to keep the screen looking lively, instead of sticking to a boring grid made up of square boxes.
The Discover feed on the upcoming Pixel Tablet will get some additional tweaks as part of the Pixel experience. The page’s background color will not only match your wallpaper but there’s also going to be a new From your apps row at the top to show relevant content from apps like Google TV installed on your device.
To get the new three-column design, you won’t need the Pixel Tablet. This UI change is going live with the Google app’s latest beta v14.2.7.26 and can be accessed on most recent tablets like the Galaxy Tab S8 series.