Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek

2025 is coming to a close, and it’s shaping up to be Android’s most pivotal year yet. While many of the updates might seem like surface-level polish, five fundamental shifts are elevating Android from its usual “powerful but rough” reputation to a more premium and polished platform.

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A unified design with Material 3 Expressive

Credit: Google

2025 has been a big year for mobile OS redesigns—Apple introduced Liquid Glass for iOS 26, while Google rolled out Material 3 Expressive with Android 16. It expands on the Material You design system with deeper color theming, springy animations, and a much more consistent visual language across the entire operating system.

What makes Material 3 Expressive special is how it extends beyond just system apps like Settings and Communication. Almost all the major Google apps now support this design language, and third-party apps can also adopt it—allowing developers to create interfaces that feel native to the OS. This means you can finally jump between your home screen and apps without that jarring shift in font styles, color schemes, and overall aesthetics that’s plagued Android for years.

Now, I know design is subjective, but Apple’s Liquid Glass has received considerable criticism for legibility issues—causing them to keep redesigning the user interface. Google’s Material 3 Expressive, on the other hand, prioritizes clarity while still looking modern and fluid. In fact, they’re already building on this foundation by adding theme support in the November Pixel Drop. For the first time in years, I’d argue Android has surpassed iPhones in delivering a more polished and consistent mobile interface.

Local, on-device AI that’s actually useful

Credit:

Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | Google

Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay and has been creeping into smartphones for a while now. The most worrying thing about this trend is that most companies are using cloud-based AI solutions—which means your data gets sent to a remote AI server for processing. Many folks find this concerning from a security and privacy standpoint, and rightfully so.

Thankfully, both Google and Apple decided to push the frontier by providing a local, on-device AI experience. This ensures you still get access to most AI features without worrying about your data being stored on some random server. That said, Apple Intelligence has been a comparatively lackluster experience, which I believe they also know—and why they offload many tasks over to ChatGPT. However, Google’s Gemini Nano model—which comes with the Pixel 9 and 10 series—is genuinely impressive. You get access to text summarization, speech-to-text transcription, image-level descriptions, and more—all done locally, without needing any internet access!

Google Pixel 10

Brand Google

SoC Google Tensor G5

Display 6.3-inch Actua OLED, 20:9

RAM 12 GB RAM

Storage 128 GB / 256 GB

Battery 4970mAh

Furthermore, as of 2025, Google is democratizing their on-board AI tech. Developers now have access to the AICore system service and the ML Kit Gen AI API, which lets them integrate any local, on-device AI models with their apps—no need to send user data to a third-party server.

That said, I’m not expecting every Android phone to have local AI starting next year. Developer adoption takes time, and the hardware requirements are steep—you need a powerful processor and around 12GB of RAM to run these models effectively. But the direction is crystal clear—Google is pushing AI from cloud-only and privacy-questionable to local, private, and eventually universal. That’s exactly the right move!

Better support for tablets and foldables with universal app resizability

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

Android has always been a great mobile operating system—the problem came when you tried using it on tablets or any large screen devices. The experience was poorly optimized as apps would just stretch to fill up the screen, or there would be black bars around the app as it loaded the same mobile layout. This is exactly why many devoted Android users would buy an iPad if they wanted to use a tablet!

Now, Google recognized this shortcoming and tried to fix it with Android 12L—a tablet-specific version optimized for large screens. That said, maintaining separate Android versions for different device types wasn’t sustainable, nor was it a practical solution with the rise of foldables that switch between phone and tablet form factors on the fly. But 2025 seems to be the year when we finally get a solution to this limitation.

With Android 16, Google is pushing adaptive apps that support universal resizability. There are no more separate versions of Android for different devices—the OS now natively supports all form factors depending on screen size. App developers now have the necessary framework to create adaptive apps with multi-column layouts that can intelligently scale to any screen size.

This means when you open an app on a larger screen, it won’t just be a blown-up version of the phone interface. Instead, it properly uses the extra screen real estate with multi-column layouts and reorganized information. Every app on your foldable will look great on both the cover display and the unfolded screen. At the same time, it’s also laying the groundwork for desktop Android experiences, i.e., ChromeOS finally merging with Android. Of course, this also hinges on developer adoption, but with the rising popularity of foldables, I believe developers will be incentivized to make their apps adaptive!

Setting a new standard for Android hardware

Credit: Cory Gunther / How-To Geek

Arguably one of Google’s most popular 2025 updates was bringing MagSafe support—called PixelSnap—to its Pixel lineup. Previous Android devices (including Pixels) needed clunky magnetic cases or adhesive stickers to magnetically attach to all the Qi2 wireless chargers and accessories—a passable but inelegant workaround. Now, with magnets built directly into the Pixel 10 devices, magnetic charging and accessories work seamlessly. You simply snap the phone onto a charger or stand, and it locks into perfect alignment every time.

Also, the base Pixel 10 comes with a true 5x optical-zoom telephoto lens. For reference, Samsung’s Galaxy S25 only offers 3x zoom, and Apple’s iPhone 17 doesn’t have a dedicated telephoto at all. Having used the 5x telephoto on my Pixel 10, I can confidently say it’s a game-changer. It not only unlocks new photography options but also serves practical purposes, like reading distant signs or posters.

That said, the most impressive achievement may just be the IP68 dust and water resistance on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold—a first for any foldable device. Dust protection has always been a major concern for folks considering a foldable smartphone, and now Google has made their foldables almost as durable as traditional slab flagships—at least when it comes to protection from the elements.

Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold

Brand Google

SoC Google Tensor G5

RAM 16GB

Storage 256 GB / 512 GB/ 1TB with Zoned UFS

Battery 5015 mAh

Operating System Android 16

A better Pixel smartphone matters for the broader Android ecosystem because Pixel devices generally represent the “vanilla” hardware experience—other manufacturers tend to build on top of it. As such, when Google raises the Pixel baseline, we can expect others to follow. For instance, according to Android Central, the Samsung Galaxy S26 series is expected to ship with Qi2 charging support—and we know who to thank for that!

Continuing to chip away at Apple’s walled garden

Credit: Jerome Thomas / How-To Geek

Possibly one of the most surprising tech updates of 2025 was Google making Android compatible with Apple’s AirDrop. Finally, we can use Android’s Quick Share feature to send and receive photos, videos, and files between Android and iPhone devices without relying on messaging apps, cloud services, or cables.

At the time of writing, this is only working on the Pixel 10 lineup, but other Android devices should get support for it soon. For it to work, you need to set your Apple device to "Everyone for 10 minutes" mode for discoverability. While that can seem like a security issue, you can always “Decline” a file being sent to you from an unknown sender. Furthermore, the implementation has gone through independent third-party security audits before release, so it should be as safe as regular Quick Share or AirDrop.

Overall, this neatly ties in with last year’s victory with RCS, where Apple finally added support for the messaging standard in iMessage—making its previously closed platform compatible with Android’s default messaging app. Between RCS and now AirDrop compatibility, it’s clear Google is systematically chipping away at Apple’s once-impenetrable ecosystem, transforming it piece by piece into something more open and accessible.

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Android’s 2025 updates prove Google is finally delivering both power and polish. These aren’t just incremental updates—they’re fundamental shifts that eliminate the compromises Android users have accepted for years. The platform is finally living up to its potential!