Actually no, material design is suppose to unify design for the web and native apps.
Many Google properties on the web are Material Design now (Play Music, Google Photos, Google Plus...
Many Google properties on the web are Material Design now (Play Music, Google Photos, Google Plus...
On desktop there is tons of wasted space, key actions are generally hidden behind pointless hidden menus or silly + buttons that do multiple things even though there's loads of space to fit multiple buttons. Google Drive, Sheets, etc. are total jokes now. And I personally find Google play music is an incredibly bad user experience now for my habits. I like listening to my thumbs up playlist (unnecessarily hidden behind a slide out menu) and I like seeing my shuffle playlist (hidden behind a button that opens an idiotic floating modal).
On mobile, everything is too spaced out so you can only see 5 out of the 50 things you might need to actually see. A perfect example is the calendar which is an unusable joke compared to the old one. Another good example is the new clock app where the alarms only show 3, and the timers are bizarrely stacked with only a tiny indicator showing there are multiple timers running.
Material is a tablet design paradigm masquerading as a total solution.
I personally have zero respect for Material, I think it's a complete joke. Their previous redesign, as fractured as it was, was better thought out than this not-at-all-responsive 'responsive' design.
The click/tap ones are the worst offenders. Why is the animation of the button dependant on where I click the button? Because it's an uneven animation my mind immediately gets drawn to it and thinks "Woah, what just happened there, did something go wrong? What was that".
And so after having done a simple action I spend a second or two with my mind replaying what just happened to try and figure out if something's wrong or not. And it still happens today, even though I know about it and I use several interfaces with Material design extensively. Because it's not consistent.
It's literally the opposite of what an animation should be. It's incredibly intrusive and unsettling instead of being subtle but reassuring you that your desired action happened.