TL;DR
- Google News might be getting ready to try on a new look, changing how it presents stories.
- This interface would do away with the existing For You and Headlines tabs.
- Instead, we’d get a unified home screen with all our news — but it’s not yet working.
Google’s got no shortage of ways to help Android users discover the latest news, and we just checked out a recent change under development in the Google app to control how your search history impacts the stories you’ll see. But if you just want the biggest headlines from around the world, all in one place, you need to look no further than the Google News app. We’ve got some progress to share here, as well, as we uncover what appears to be Google’s efforts towards bringing the app a new look for its home tab.
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.
We’re looking at Google News version 5.115.0.670880469 here, and if you fire the app up like normal, you’ll see a screen like the one on the left here, with the same News interface we’ve been familiar with. But with this new release, we found that we’re also able to access a new view for the app’s main interface, dropping the For You and Headlines tabs, as you can see to the right:
The dates in that screen might have clued you off to the fact that something’s a little off with this mode, and it’s not pulling the sort of recent stories we’d expect our functional News app to do. But it’s possible Google still has something to hook up on the back end to ensure that this view has access to current news, and may initially be focusing on developing the interface. We’ve also uncovered ongoing work towards moving the app over to a new framework, with devs embracing Jetpack Compose, but that shouldn’t have any immediate user-facing impact.
This all means that for the moment, this change is largely a curiosity, but we expect to be keeping an eye on News developments and will hopefully be able to spot if and when this UI starts becoming properly functional.
