This Google Lens Tweak Looks Perfect For One-Handed Operation (APK Teardown)
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Lens offers a powerful image-based tool for conducting searches.
- Right now, when accessing results that search bar lives at the top of your screen.
- Google’s experimenting with a new bottom layout that could make it easier to use one-handed.
If you’re not already regularly using Google Lens, you are probably missing out on quite a lot, as the image-based search tool has a fascinating ability to open up the world around us. Out for a walk and curious about the trees lining the path? A quick lookup with Lens can make you feel like an amateur arborist in seconds. Spontaneous use cases like that really benefit from an app that’s as easy to use as possible, and today we’re checking out one in-development change that could add a little bit of help in exactly that direction.
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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.
Google recently updated its Android app to version 16.22.44.sa.arm64 beta, and we’ve been putting it through its paces to check for any interesting changes. When it comes to Google Lens, we identified one in particular that slightly modifies the service’s search interface.
Right now, after you access an image in Lens, the app pulls up a search card from the bottom, and you can swipe up to fill the screen. But as you do so, your search bar keeps right on moving up, too, and ends up perched along the display’s top edge.
While that makes it easy to see at a glance, it’s also not in the easiest-to-reach place for refining your search, especially if you’re trying to use your phone one-handed. And with the sort of casual, spontaneous usage situations that Lens can really enhance, it’s easy for us to appreciate how being able to quickly work one-handed could be a real improvement. To that end, we’ve been able to activate a preview of a modified UI for Lens that moves this bar to the bottom.
Currently this bottom-search-bar interface is not yet publicly visible in Lens, even with the Google app’s beta release. And for all we know, Google’s just kicking the tires on this tweak, and may never end up making it the official Lens UI. Do you think it should, though? Tell us if you’re a top-bar or bottom-bar fan down in the comments.
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