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It has been about a month since Chrome 85 appeared in the Beta Channel, and now Google is starting to roll it out to the stable branch. There aren't many easily-visible changes, but as the old Transformers theme says, there's more than meets the eye.
Nest Hubs and other Smart Displays let you easily hide, star, and share slideshow photos
The feature is now available for third-party Google Assistant Smart Displays
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Google's smart speakers and displays are brimming with features, some of which unknown. Many of you likely never noticed that they can ask their smart displays to star, share, or hide a pic when it comes up, but that feature has been available for a year. Google is now making it more visible by bringing the icons to the screen.
Sharing Google Drive files and Docs is getting easier (and prettier)
The share dialog is getting an updated look in the coming weeks
Google is tweaking the way the sharing dialog in its G Suite services will look. The change, which affects things like Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, has a more "task-focused" interface, separating link-based sharing from targeted contact sharing. In short, it should be a bit easier to use, shows more information at a glance — like who you've shared something with and what their permissions are — and generally offers a more friendly look. (It's also much prettier.)
One of the worst features in Android for a few years now has been the Sharesheet, the UI that pops up when you hit the share button in an app. In trying to offer you the most convenient and contextual sharing options every time it loads, the menu became incredibly slow and would infuriatingly update as you were about to make a selection. Google made some changes in Android 10 that have resulted in a better, faster sharing experience.
Sharing on Android is kind of a whole big mess — different apps handle sharing in different ways, and none of them are great. The YouTube Android recently got a new share menu to replace its old custom UI — and rather than adopting Google's standard sharing interface, it's implemented yet another custom one.
New functionality has cropped up in the beta version of the Google app. Users can now share search results, potentially saving time: instead of telling someone to Google something, you can just share a link that'll do it for them. It's sort of like LMGTFY, but slightly less passive-aggressive.
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Android's share menu has been a bit messy for years, mostly thanks to the slow-loading app-specific targets that appear at the top of the list. In fact, many apps opt to create their own interfaces for sharing, so users don't have to deal with the janky native UI. In Android Q, the default share menu is receiving a facelift, just like Google promised last year.
We've been nothing if not critical of Android's slow and wildly inconsistent share interface, and Google has promised that fixing it is "a priority." In what is likely to be related, updated versions of the UI have started rolling out to a handful of apps in the last month, and the latest to see a taste of something new is Google Photos. Calm your excitement, though, as it's still in limited testing.
Slowly but surely, Chrome is trying to converge native and web apps. Chrome 71 came out a few days ago on Android, but one new feature flew under the radar — web apps can now appear in the system share menu.
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- With further testing, we can confirm that these shared albums are Live Albums, making this a sort of backward workflow for the already existing functionality.
Google Photos is magic (and my personal favorite service/product to come out of the company), but one thing that can be a little bit tedious is sharing content in it with others. A small step to ease that process seems to be rolling out, though, as a new "Share as album" button has appeared for some in the Google Photos Android app when browsing the People and Pets albums. Inundating your coworkers with pictures of your cat will never be easier.
Google Podcasts is pretty widely regarded as lacking in features its competition has — notably, you can't mark multiple episodes as played at once or set the app to automatically download new episodes of shows you're subscribed to — but it's gradually improving. Case in point: the app can now generate links to podcasts and shows for easy sharing.
Google is rolling out v8.22 of its self-titled app. You'll now find a new widget for Sound Search hidden away, and a teardown includes several topics related to auto-downloading podcasts, Google Assistant for Households, a page for your contributions, and an animation to promote the upcoming Pixel Stand.
A fresh round of updates to the Google Photos app began rolling out this week. Aside from a few small tweaks to wording, you're probably not going to see any noticeable changes as a result of installing the latest version, but as is often the case, there are at least several topics to cover in a teardown. We can look forward to counting up Likes on our shared photos, easier sharing of Motion Stills, and of course, the wider rollout of Google Lens. Also making a return appearance is Austin's infamous mysteryer feature.
Twitter is no stranger to server-side tests, and now the company appears to have another in the wings. AP's own Artem noticed a bit of a tweak in Twitter for Android in recent days, with a new three-dot share button appearing at the bottom of tweets. All the sharing options previously present in the arrow menu to a tweet's top right have been relocated to this button, and the previous "send privately" option is now gone.
Google has just pushed out a blog post that indirectly outlines a few changes to Google Trips. We reported last month that manually adding reservations and support for bus and train tickets had been implemented in the app. This latest post by Google shows off some additional features, like easy itinerary sharing and new reservation types like restaurants and car rentals.
A new beta update of Google Maps began rolling out late Tuesday night. The changes aren't particularly major, but they might tie up a few loose ends. If you're a Local Guide with a few points to your name, this version will bring the ability to share links to individual reviews. There are also some tweaks to the notification settings, including a new notification for people with business listings to maintain. Finally, there's an improvement to the parking difficulty rating system, but it may not be live yet.
For quite a while, Twitter has been trying to make Direct Messages a thing, and today the latest improvement has arrived: a direct message button in tweets. Whether this will make anyone actually share a specific tweet in a private message, who knows, but it's there anyway. Keep in mind this button is only being added to Twitter's mobile apps; no word if it'll be added to the web app, or anywhere else for that matter.
Sharing works pretty well in Android - the standard "share" command and its collection of APIs allows for easily getting content from one app to another. But if you're anything like most Android users, you have dozens of apps installed that include Share functions, and you're only used to actually using Share in a few of them. Android N has a little feature that makes that interaction much more user-friendly: Share apps can now be pinned to the top of the cross-app menu.
When I'm browsing a comments section on Reddit on the Android version of Chrome, I prefer to open links in a new tab, because opening them directly will make the current page "forget" which threads I've already minimized. But when the links are to a YouTube video, they open in a tab with the mobile version of YouTube, instead of in the dedicated Android app. This little app fixes that: Open Link With allows you to open a web page with any compatible app. It's perfect for quickly switching over to YouTube for that link I opened wrong, or for opening a page in an alternate browser that isn't set to the Android default.