One of the major announcements to come out of Google I/O 2025 was the launch of Android 16 QPR1 Beta 1, and with it, Google introduced the ability to resize the Quick Settings tiles as part of the Material 3 Expressive redesign. We got some time to check this out for ourselves, and it seems like an honest to god great quality-of-life improvement. However, it also introduced what could be a minor annoyance for some users. When you resize the tiles to make them smaller, the label for that Quick Settings tile goes away.
When you look at Quick Settings tiles in Android 15, each tile has a label that tells you what it is very clearly. For example, the tile for auto-rotate says auto-rotate alongside its icon. In the Android 16 QPR1 Beta 1 software, shrinking the tiles removes the words auto-rotate. This might not bother most people, especially those who are familiar with each tile and what its associated icon looks like. However, there are undoubtedly going to be some users who may not use the quick settings tiles often and aren’t sure what each one does without that label. Thankfully, it seems that Google is working on a solution for this to roll out (hopefully) with Android 16.
When you resize Quick Settings tiles in Android 16, the label will appear in a different spot
Although the label is gone from the actual tile when you resize it to be smaller, Android Authority reports that Google is working on a way to keep it simple in terms of identifying each tile. Instead of the label being on the tile itself, the label will simply move to the bottom of the Quick Settings panel. To see what each tile does, all you have to do is tap one of those smaller tiles. Doing so will flash the label in the active apps bar at the bottom. This bar looks like a little elongated pill-shaped Google Search bar widget in the bottom left. It’s easy to miss if you don’t know to look there, but once you know the label appears there, it’s easy to see.
This bar isn’t present in Android 15’s Quick Settings panel, so this is a new addition with Android 16, but that’s really beside the point. Google adding this is going to make it so that you won’t have to compromise too much if you decide to fill your Quick Settings panel with smaller tiles. And we imagine a lot of users will want to make the titles smaller, because it’ll mean you can fit more of them on one page of the panel.
That being said, it’s not entirely clear yet if this will release with Android 16 stable on day one. Even if it does seem unlikely that Google would leave it out.
