Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google is updating Gmail’s interface with additional iconography.
- You’ll now start seeing icons associated with options in the overflow menu accessed while viewing emails.
- We’re not yet seeing this on all devices, however, so Google may be slowly enabling the change on its own end.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of icons. While they can feel deceptively simple, a few well-chosen glyphs can make all the difference when it comes to improving our experiences with apps by quickly and nonverbally communicating functionality — it’s the kind of attention that turns good apps into great apps. This week we’re looking at the latest way Google’s employing icons to make one of its Android apps a smidge more usable, as Gmail gets a new look for some of its menus.
When you pull up Gmail’s main menu by tapping the hamburger icon at the top-left of your Android screen, Google makes it easy to navigate by pairing icons with labels for all the menu’s options: a trash can for your trash, a clock for snoozed messages, and so forth.
Viewing an individual email, though, when you tap on one of the overflow menus on the right, you’ve only been presented with a text list of options: no icons. But now 9to5Google has spotted that in Gmail’s new version 2025.01.25.721794537 release, those menus are getting some icons of their own, as well.
With this change, those in-email menu options are now all associated with matching icons. The whole menu shifts around a bit to make room for them, and for the screen-top menu with options for the full email conversation, Google also reorganizes the entries a little, now sorting them into a few distinct groups.
This sounds like a welcome addition to Gmail, but even after updating the app to this latest build and force restarting, we aren’t yet seeing these icons on our own devices. It’s entirely possible that there’s still a switch on Google’s end that needs to be enabled on an account level, so it may just be a matter of another few days before the icon-rich menus start appearing for everyone.
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