Teardowns can bring both good and bad news. At times, I've been afraid to write about things buried in the dark corners of an apk because they would be misunderstood or make people angry. Then there are times that I see something and I can't wait to tell everybody about it. This is one of the good times. I know people want this, so here it is: Inbox is finally going to offer email signatures. Go ahead, it's ok to shed tears of joy.

Disclaimer: Teardowns are necessarily speculative and usually based on incomplete evidence. It's possible that the guesses made here are totally and completely wrong. There is always a chance that details may change or plans may be cancelled prior to the launch of a new feature discovered in a teardown. Much like rumors, nothing is certain until it's officially announced.

Email Signatures Are Coming

Any regular Android user can probably name off some Google apps that they want to gain a certain feature or undergo a few changes; but there are a handful of apps that can evoke surprisingly powerful opinions about where things have gone wrong. For example, the mere mention of Hangouts or Google+ can ignite rants of epic proportions. Inbox users haven't been quite so enraged yet, but the topic of emails signatures has turned into something of a hot point in recent months. Fortunately, the problem should be solved before tempers boil over. It's finally going to happen (someday).

Email signatures aren't live yet, but there's no mistaking the evidence. For each signed-in email account, there's going to be a simple settings screen where users can enter text for a signature and toggle it on or off. That's basically it.

From Strings.xml:

<string name="bt_preferences_signature_settings_title">Signature settings</string>

<string name="bt_preferences_signature_enabled_title">Turn signature on</string>

<string name="bt_preferences_signature_text_empty_placeholder">Not set</string>

<string name="bt_preferences_signature_text_hint">Type your signature</string>

<string name="bt_preferences_signature_enabled_key">signatureEnabledKey</string>

<string name="bt_preferences_signature_settings_key">signatureSettingsKey</string>

<string name="bt_preferences_signature_text_key">signatureTextKey</string>

From bt_signature_preferences.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<PreferenceScreen android:title="@string/bt_preferences_signature_settings_title" android:key="@string/bt_preferences_signature_settings_key"

xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

<CheckBoxPreference android:enabled="false" android:title="@string/bt_preferences_signature_enabled_title" android:selectable="true" android:key="@string/bt_preferences_signature_enabled_key" />

<com.google.android.apps.bigtop.widgets.EditTextPreferenceWithSpanned android:enabled="false" android:hint="@string/bt_preferences_signature_text_hint" android:singleLine="false" android:selectable="true" android:key="@string/bt_preferences_signature_text_key" android:dependency="@string/bt_preferences_signature_enabled_key" />

</PreferenceScreen>

There aren't any indicators for how close signature support is to completion or when it should launch, but it shouldn't require any more resources than we can already see. This looks like it could be ready to go at any time, assuming there isn't any code to finish or outstanding bugs.

Wrap-Up

A quick look through the comments section of most Inbox articles on Android Police shows that there are plenty of users anxiously waiting for email signatures. This is clearly the top issue for most people, so it'll be great to see it knocked off the list.

There aren't really any big changes, which suggests this is probably more of a bug fix update. If you would like to get the latest version before it rolls out to your account naturally, just head over to APK Mirror and download it at your leisure.