Google TV Might Soon Turn Your Idle Screen Into A Live News Hub (APK Teardown)

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

TL;DR

Google TV started experimenting with News Briefs last month.
Now it looks like Google’s considering adding News Briefs to Google TV’s Ambient Mode.
It does appear that this could be an optional change, with the ability to turn it off.

What’s the single biggest Google presence in your home? For a lot of us, it’s going to be our televisions powered by Google TV, connecting us with our favorite streaming apps and services. But perhaps as a consequence of how prominent that screen can be in our lives, we can be extremely sensitive to changes to it, especially if that involves Google trying to expose us to more ads. Today we’ve got a preview of where Google TV development could be headed next, and we wouldn’t be surprised if this one ends up being a little controversial, too.

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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.

Late last month, Google shared that it was starting an experiment that would present some Google TV viewers in the US with an informative News Briefs screen that would feature overviews of top stories. Testing on this still seems to be in the early stages, and we haven’t heard much since Google’s announcement, but we may already have an idea of what the next phase of News Briefs could look like.

Analyzing the new 3.1.0.721404302 release of the Google TV Ambient Mode app, we’ve identified several text strings that strongly suggest Google is planning to add support for News Briefs.

Code

Show news headlines in your screensaver. Enable them in settings  Show top news headlines. These headlines are AI-generated based on the day’s top news articles.  Note that this is an experimental AI feature and can make mistakes. Top news may include violent or potentially disturbing events.  Top news  %1$d of %2$d  Press OK to listen to your news brief

Now, before you start getting too concerned about Ambient Mode’s pretty AI-generated wallpapers being ruined by all this messy news, it does appear that there will be a toggle for this view in settings, that will ideally let you avoid it entirely if so desired. At least, code for that setting may exist, but will it actually be implemented in a way that you can control? That part, we can’t yet say, so you can understand the source of our apprehension.

On the flip side, we imagine that there are also a whole lot of Google TV users who would jump at the chance to turn their otherwise-unused screens into a live news feed. And if this feature ends up making it out of development, they might get just that.

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