Material You has brought us into a whole new era of design on Android — even if Google currently seems a little too obsessed with the past. While the company spent the entirety of 2021 updating its apps with dynamic themes and all sorts of enhancements, third-party developers have been slow to bring this new look to their apps on Android. One of our favorite Reddit clients on the Play Store is getting an all-new look and feel, now available for beta testers.

Sync for Reddit is, in my eyes, one of the best ways to browse the site on the go, offering a far better experience than the official app. It'll finally get a complete Material You overhaul in a future update, offering dynamic themes, a new layout for browsing content, and even themed icon support once it's active with Android 13. It's a big change to a classic Reddit client on Android, and marks one of the most popular apps yet to take on a full Android 12-friendly appearance in style.

In these screenshots, you can see how different the UI looks compared to the current iteration. Bottom navigation bars, squircle floating action buttons, a large amount of one hand-friendly white space along the top — it's all here, building the sort of experience you'd expect from a modern app running on Android 12. It even works with dark mode, so you won't have to sacrifice your vision for the sake of dynamic themes.

With its latest update, regular users on the free or Pro versions of the app can sign up for the open beta program to try it out for themselves. Otherwise, the dev channel is also available for a separate $4.99 purchase if you're truly impatient.

UPDATE: 2022/03/21 17:16 EST BY WILL SATTELBERG

Out now for beta users

A couple of weeks after initially launching for dev users, anyone can try out Sync for Reddit's Material You redesign now by jumping into the beta program of the free or Pro versions of the app. Sync is my main way of browsing Reddit on Android, but compared to the now-outgoing UI, this update is a huge step up. Everything feels as fast, smooth, and fluid as before, but with an all-new coat of paint.

The new top banner makes it easy to reach the first post on my feed without stretching my hand. The bottom navigation bar, which you must enable via a toggle in settings, makes it easy to reach the Explore and Inbox tabs, though the hamburger menu still exists in the top-left corner. Every UI element, from buttons to text and even overflow menus, has been updated, and they all look far better than before. Obviously, the highlight here is support for dynamic themes. Not only does it pull colors from your wallpaper — in a tasteful, subdued manner, in my opinion — but it also supports dark mode.

Overall, it's a great update that'll only get better as it comes to more non-beta users. For now, if you can't wait, joining the beta program is just as easy as enrolling through the Play Store.

Thanks: Hamzah