Google Keep’s big 2025 — what’s next?

• Google rolled out Material 3 Expressive, redesigned widgets, FAB tweaks and new sorting for Google Keep in 2025.
• Keep gained web text formatting and Wear OS updates while the Apple Watch app was removed.
• AI opportunities remain: transcription/summarization from Pixel Recorder, integration with Gemini and NotebookLM, and reminders-to-Tasks migration are in play.
• Keep remains intentionally lightweight, positioned alongside Google Docs, Sheets and Google Tasks rather than replacing them.

2025: a year of polish and platform updates

Google Keep received a steady stream of refinements in 2025 focused on design consistency and usability. The most visible change was the Material 3 Expressive redesign that aligns Keep with other Google Workspace apps like Docs and Gmail.

Small but meaningful changes rolled out across mobile and web: a reworked floating action button (with a setting to create text notes by default), a redesigned quick-capture homescreen widget, and the ability to sort notes on the homepage.

Design and cross-platform work

The Material 3 Expressive refresh introduces containers for search and notes, giving Keep a cleaner, more consistent interface across Android, web and Wear OS. The Wear OS update in particular benefits the Tile experience for quick access.

Features and platform moves

Web users got richer text formatting, improving Keep’s usefulness for longer notes. At the same time Google removed the aging Apple Watch app, signaling a consolidation of platform support.

What Keep still is: a fast, lightweight scratchpad

Despite new features, Keep remains intentionally simple compared with full-featured editors like Google Docs. Its grid-first UI and minimal friction for capturing ideas are core to its appeal; users still treat it as a fast scratchpad rather than a document editor.

The next frontier: AI-driven note experiences

Looking forward, the logical evolution for Keep is to adopt selective AI features without sacrificing speed. Three realistic directions stand out: device transcription and summarization, proactive assistance tied to email/calendar context, and tighter connections to Google Workspace tools.

Where AI fits

Pixel Recorder’s transcription and summary capabilities would map naturally into Keep as universal device features. NotebookLM has matured as an AI-native research tool, making it unlikely to be fully absorbed into Keep — but cross-product links (searchable notes, research summaries) could be valuable.

Quality-of-life improvements to watch

• Faster, optional in-note AI summaries and highlights.
• Deeper integration with Google Tasks and reminders migration.
• Improved keep.google.com modernization for web power users.

Ultimately, Google Keep’s future will be a balance: preserve the speed and simplicity people love while adding selective AI and workspace integrations that extend usefulness without turning it into Docs. Users who want something more powerful already have NotebookLM and Gemini; Keep’s role is to remain the quick, dependable note app that complements those tools.