In brief
- Google News may be preparing to try out a new look and change the way it presents the news.
- This interface would eliminate the need for the existing For You and Headlines tabs.
- Instead, we would get a unified home screen with all our news – but that doesn’t work yet.
Google has a lot of ways to help Android users discover the latest news. We’ve just looked at a recent change being developed in the Google app to control how your search history affects the articles you see. But if you just want the most important headlines from around the world in one place, look no further than the Google News app. We’ve got some progress to report here too, as we’ve apparently uncovered Google’s efforts to give the app a new look for the home page.
A APK teardown helps predict features that might be included in a service in the future based on code in progress. However, such predicted features may not make it into a public release.
We’re looking at Google News version 5.115.0.670880469 here. If you launch the app as usual, you’ll see a screen like the one on the left, with the same news interface we know. However, with this new version, we also have access to a new view for the main app interface, with the For You and Headlines tabs gone, as you can see on the right:
The data on this screen may have tipped you off that there is something wrong with this mode and it is not showing the kind of breaking news we would expect from our functional News app. However, it is possible that Google still needs to hook something up in the backend to ensure this view has access to breaking news and may be focusing on UI development first. We also discovered ongoing work to move the app to a new framework, with the developers using Jetpack Compose, but that should not have any immediate impact on the user.
All of this means that this change is largely a curiosity for now, but we’ll likely keep an eye on news and hopefully be able to see if and when this UI starts working properly.
