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Have you received a call recently about extending the warranty for a car you don’t own? Maybe you got one from the “IRS” about money you owe? With over 150 million daily robocalls being made in just the US alone, we’d be shocked if you haven’t. One tool Android smartphone owners can use to filter out these annoyances is the Verified Call feature in the Google Phone app. Now a whole new set of users is getting access, as Verified Calls starts going live Germany.
Google loves to shuffle up its settings menu every so often. Whether it's adding a splash of color to Android's settings (before taking it away on a whim) or introducing a search bar to help you find exactly what you need, even the slightest tweak can streamline your day-to-day experience. Google's Phone app is receiving such an update, with new categories to make it easier to sort through all of its options.
Latest Google Phone app Beta can now be installed from the Play Store on pretty much any phone
With one caveat: It might not show up in search
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Back in April, Google's popular Phone app expanded its device support on the Play Store. Previously tied to Pixel and Android One devices, Google appeared to be opening it up for use on other devices and software. At the time, it still didn't work for lots of phones, including OnePlus and Samsung devices. But apparently, that's changed, and we can confirm you can now install the latest Google Phone app Beta from the Play Store on Samsung and OnePlus phones — and probably more, too.
Google's Phone dialer received an update to v37 in its beta channel yesterday, and although many of us didn't notice any major changes in the app, some lucky recipients of a server-side test are seeing a new interface in the recent call tab, including a new way to group calls and the ability to swipe to delete entries from the log.
Following the update to the Google Contacts app, a matching update to its Phone app was also shipped for Pixels and other Google-supported handsets. The story is the same, though the visual changes look less severe since the old versions were already less colorful and contact photos were a bit more dominant. There aren't any live functional changes for the general public, but there is one notable change to the Favorites tab in the works.
Google announced several changes coming in Android P on its Developers Blog today. Among them is an important change to the way phone permissions work that aims to stop apps from having unnecessary access to your phone activity.
Over the recent months, we've seen Wear OS implement a blacker theme over many of its apps and interface elements. This has carried over to Google's own apps with Keep being the prime example and now another is joining the fold: the Phone app.
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Yesterday, Google opened the doors to a new beta channel for its Phone app. For those joining the beta releases, there's already a fresh update to v19 waiting for them to play with. There are a lot of changes coming through in this round, including some updates to the UI, an option to filter spam calls, and much more. If you want to get your hands on the latest version, but aren't quite ready to join the beta, grab the apk from the APK Mirror link below.
The Google Phone app has been updated fairly frequently as of late. In December, assisted dialing was added, and floating chat heads arrived in February. Now the company has opened a testing program on the Play Store, so you can try out in-development features before they arrive for everyone.
Android Messages set an example last year by doing away with its own built-in notification settings and instead redirecting users to the new Notification Channels feature in Android 8.0 Oreo. This single change gave users more options to fine-tune notifications than the app previously offered, and it was all in a fairly standard system interface. The Google Phone app is now making a similar change, but this time it's relinquishing its old settings screen for sound and vibrations and replacing it with the Sound settings offered by the system.
Google's custom Nexus/Pixel dialer has added a few cool features over the years like local search and video call integration, but the interface hasn't changed in ages. Today, it looks like Google is testing a redesign that moves your tabs to the bottom. This isn't always a surefire way to improve app usability, but I think it works here.
There's a new update to the Google Phone app rolling out to Google-supported devices (e.g. Pixel, Android One, etc.), and this one brings a long-awaited feature: Chat heads. More specifically, this is the floating widget with the contact photo of the person you're talking to. Also coming in the future, or possibly already live for some, is support for the new Real-Time Text protocol.