Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos has been working on a change to how the overflow menu in its gallery view operates.
- New menu options could integrate currently separate wallpaper and contacts controls.
- Both selections would be consolidated under the “Use as” setting.
Considering how very far smartphones have come, it can sometimes be a little surprising when you stop and take a moment to think about all the seemingly very simple things that we’re still trying to get right. Take contact pictures, example. In theory, that sounds like the most straightforward feature in the world: just let us assign an image to the people we get in touch the most through our apps. In practice, there are more moving parts than you might expect, and apps are still trying to get their approach just right.
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.
Last week we looked at some in-progress work towards modifying the UI for viewing images in the Google Photos gallery, changing the behavior of the three-dot overflow menu in the top-right corner of the screen to now display a drop-down menu of photo options, rather than calling up the same interface you’d access by swiping up from the bottom.
So far, the carousel of image options we see in the existing version of Google Photos has separate “Set as wallpaper” and “Use as” entries — and you might not know it from the label, but the latter option there is the one you select to assign a picture as a profile photo in an app like Contacts or WhatsApp.
Digging into Google Photos version 7.21.0.737764319, we’re still able to get an early preview at this new UI with revised overflow menu behavior, only this time we get “Use as” among the options there. Tapping this then presents us with one of two options: Set the image as as your wallpaper, or assign it to a contact.
Bundling both these two under “Use as” rather than offering a stand-alone wallpaper option certainly makes a fair amount of sense, but honestly at this point Google’s progress with this UI redesign feels more work-in-progress than ever, so we wouldn’t be surprised if further changes end up moving these parts around even more.
