Google app beta update resizes app icons, auto rotates your home screen
This before-and-after GIF shows you how the launcher now reduces the size of apps with oversized icons in order to give a more consistent, grid-style layout.
The Google Now Launcher will do this automatically once you update the Google app, provided you have the launcher installed, too.
The other new trick is an auto-rotate feature, which reformats the home screen layout when you turn your device sideways.
This can be turned off if it’s not to your liking. From the Google app go to Settings > Home Screen > Allow rotation and toggle it off. You may find some widgets don’t handle this new layout all that well. Since this is a beta release, expect Google and developers to find workarounds for this weirdness.
The impact on you: The app icon resizing will bring some needed smoothness to your Android home screen. Developers have more freedom on Android than iOS in how their app icons look, but that has lead to home screens that look too crowded. The next upgrade needs to find a way to make the widgets resize better when switching to landscape mode for a more optimized experience.