Google Contacts Is Making It Easier To Check When You Last Contacted Someone (APK Teardown)
Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Contacts could soon start displaying recent calls and texts on contact profiles.
- The feature will appear as a new “Recent activity” section on contact profiles, listing the last call and text with each contact.
Google Contacts‘ Single Contact widget lets you add specific contacts to your home screen. It features shortcuts to help you quickly call or text the contact, and shows your recent messages with the contact. Google now seems to be integrating the latter into profile pages in the Contacts app, allowing you to view recent texts and calls with a contact on their profile.
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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’ve spotted this upcoming change in the latest Google Contacts build (version 4.54.40.752377034), and it adds a new “Recent activity” section to contact profiles. As shown in the following screenshots, the Recent activity feature requires access to your call logs and SMS messages, and you have to grant the respective permissions for the feature to work.
Once enabled, the Recent activity section lists your most recent call and text with the contact. Tapping on the call opens your default dialer app, letting you quickly call the contact, while selecting the text opens the conversation in the default messaging app. The latter works for both SMS and RCS messages. In our testing, we also found that the feature only displays text messages and will show the penultimate message if the last message was an image.
If Google Contacts does not find any call logs or messages with a contact, it won’t display the Recent activity section on their profile. In cases where the Recent activity section does appear, it will make it easier for users to know when they last called or texted a contact at a glance. We expect the feature to roll out to users with a subsequent update, and we’ll update this post as soon as it’s widely available.
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