In late January, word came out that Samsung and Google had reached some agreements to work on presenting a more unified user experience on Android devices. As part of that agreement, it appears Samsung is on the way to phasing out the Magazine UX it had been working on despite the recent release of new tablets equipped with Magazine. A new screenshot of the KitKat notification bar that Samsung is working on for their devices shows how the company is in fact reversing course to come closer to Google's vision for the platform. The choice of color for the icons may seem like a simple thing, and it is, but it reveals a lot about the direction of development.
When Google released KitKat last year, one thing users noticed almost immediately were the white-only icons in the notification bar. The change to a monochrome design was significant enough that Google even had to spend some time explaining why this had occurred. The new image shows that Samsung has adopted Google's direction in this area and extended this design cue to its own TouchWiz interface. Eldar Murtazin, @eldarmurtazin, indicates in his tweets about this change that it also means a lot for the future of the TouchWiz interface. This likely means the flat, monochrome concept may be extended throughout the user experience on Samsung devices.
Um, this isn’t news, or new. KitKat has rules that state that the status bar icons must be white, and these icons are already on the KitKat update for Note 3 and Galaxy S4, so there’s nothing new about it, it’s just Samsung following the rules, something OEMs have to do in order to get access to Google services. PhoneArena wrongly picked this up as new stuff earlier; Murtazin was just tweeting about it in the hope of sites picking up his drivel once again (not that he isn’t right sometimes), which I see has happened.