Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The in-progress smart features and personalization options we spotted in Workspace earlier this month are now further along.
- Gmail is working on a settings screen to let Workspace users configure privacy options.
- Progress is still pretty rough, and this feature likely has a long way to go before it’s ready.
When we’re peeking under the hood of app updates, looking for hints of what the developers might be bringing us next, we have to be ready to hit a few roadblocks along the way — sometimes it looks like work is heading in a certain direction, but as soon as we start pulling on that thread, the app shuts us down. That’s just what happened a few weeks back when looking into Gmail development, but today we’ve finally got some progress to share.
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.
Back then, we uncovered progress towards giving the app some new smart features and personalization options for Workspace users — except that when trying to access them, the app just crashed on us. Well, sometimes patience is rewarded, and when trying it out again with Gmail’s new 2024.08.25.668103139.Release build it’s now (sort of ) working.
We’re able to get the app to now bring up the screen for the personalization settings that only teased us before. But whiles that helps clarify the nature these controls will take, letting you choose how much of your personal data you want Google accessing for the purposes of customizing your user experience, actually trying to engage with them once again results in crashes.
Being able to dig further into settings like this absolutely suggests to us that development work on this addition is actively underway, but at the same time, the issues we keep running up against sure make it feel like this is a long way off from being complete, with key components yet to be implemented or connected.
That also means that Google could change up its approach to how it presents these controls before the update actually hits any users. We’ll keep poking away at new releases to try and stay on top of the company’s progress.
