A new look for Snikket Android

We’re sharing a sneak peek at the visual design of the upcoming release of Snikket’s Android app - what we’ve changed, why, and how we got here. The new app will be released on 25th January 2026. To learn more about using Snikket for your communication, check our homepage.

The foundational principles of good user interface design never really change. People should be able to easily find common actions, text should be clear and legible, buttons should be large enough to press, to name a few. But around these pillars, aesthetic conventions are always shifting and evolving.

Years ago, square corners used to be lauded as “crisp”. Today, rounded edges are marvellously “smooth”. Where shadows used to add a three-dimensional realism to our interfaces, flat designs are now the norm in most apps.

One of Snikket’s goals is to be approachable and familiar to people who are used to other popular messaging ecosystems. It should be a welcoming gateway to the world of decentralized messaging. This means, where reasonable, keeping up with the conventions established by other widespread communication apps. We can’t stand still.

Snikket’s Android app has been looking increasingly out of place in recent years, compared to the rest of the apps on a typical Android phone. A large reason for this is the shift towards Google’s Material design - the latest design framework that Android uses, and provides to developers, to help with the design, colours, typography and user interface controls in applications.

For the next release, the Snikket app has been updated to Material 3. This is largely thanks to the work done by Daniel on the upstream Conversations app which underlies the Snikket Android app. On top of the work in Conversations, we have put a Snikket spin on the new interface, aligning it with our colours, and making adjustments to various elements to ensure the design feels familiar, friendly and accessible.

While our brand colour remains our iconic yellow, we have designed a new colour palette for this release. This is derived from Material 3 guidelines, with assistance from the ever-helpful folk at Superbloom, plus a custom-built utility to ensure excellent colour contrast across all our new colours and ensure sufficient legibility.

Speaking of colours, the app now also supports “Material You”, which is a feature of modern Android that allows apps to adapt to a user-chosen colour scheme or wallpaper image without sacrificing usability. If enabled in the settings, Snikket will automatically follow your system’s dynamic colour scheme.

Chat bubbles have been given additional space to more clearly separate individual messages, and default font sizes have been slightly increased. These changes were made after carefully reviewing the interfaces of other similar messaging apps. The goal is to allow anyone to feel as “at home” when using Snikket as they would any other app on their device.

Snikket continues to follow the system font preferences as in the past, but during our research we found our default font size was slightly smaller than other messaging apps we compared with. Our default size now matches what other similar apps use, and an in-app setting allows you to further boost the font size of messages in case you just need that little bit of extra clarity in your chats.

We hope that each aspect of the new design helps people feel even more at home when using Snikket. The new release will be available on the 25th January!