Google is always optimizing its Android apps for smartphones by introducing new features or enhancing existing ones. But the same couldn’t be said for tablet apps. Until very recently, the company had shown very little interest in the form factor, making any given tablet pretty much an oversized Android phone at best. With Android 12L, Google took a serious interest in the form factor, and ahead of the Pixel tablet launch in 2023, the company shows no signs of slowing down. It has now released an update that makes Google Lens much more intuitive for large screens.
9to5Google reports that the Google app (which contains Assistant, Podcasts, and Lens) was updated to version 13.19 on the beta channel, allowing Google Lens to work in landscape orientation on tablets. The quality of life update is a breath of fresh air for larger screens, as users can now take better advantage of that widescreen. The landscape version of Lens uses all the horizontal space to display content so that viewing results from filters such as Search or Homework is less convoluted, ever so slightly.
As you can see from the screenshots below, the viewfinder doesn’t fill the entire screen width, though. Google’s adding some padding to the sides so that it still looks reasonable. The same can be said of many of Google’s apps, which are already pretty well optimized for tablets. For example, Discover, Podcasts, and Gmail use two-column layouts, while apps like Search are padded, so results are not too wide.
Per the report, the Lens landscape capability is limited to tablets, which means that phones remain portrait only. You won’t be waiting too long to try the feature, though, as version 13.19 of the Google app should arrive on the stable channel next week.
Lens is only the first of more than 20 apps Google promised will get tablet-centric updates at Google I/O 2022. The others include Maps, Photos, and the Play Store. As Google continues optimizing more of its applications for large screen devices, this will hopefully push more developers to follow suit.