Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google appears to be working on a new gallery picker for the Messages app.
- The latest beta adds a camera icon that opens up access to your gallery when starting a new message to a group.
- After picking an image, you can then select the recipients.
Google has been working on quite a few new features for the Messages app as of late. A few weeks ago, it was discovered Google could let users turn off expressive animations. More recently, however, we spotted a redesigned Selfie GIF feature. Now we have found that Google could make a change to the UI to introduce a new gallery picker for group messages.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
In the latest beta for Google Messages (messages.android_20240506_01_RC00.phone_samsung_openbeta_dynamic), we have uncovered a change to the app’s UI. This change introduces a new camera icon that appears just left of the search icon. When tapped, this icon takes the user directly to their photo gallery before starting a new group message.
You can view how the feature works in the video below.
So, instead of creating a group and then tapping on the camera icon to open up the gallery, this new shortcut reverses that order. Such a function would help to streamline the process if you just want to quickly share an image with a few people.
As this is an APK teardown, it’s unknown when or if Google will roll out this feature.