We’ve been hearing that Google plan on unifying all of their messaging protocols into one service for some time now and, we recently learnt that it’s going to be called Babble. It’s been a long time coming, and now it looks like Phandroid have been given a sneak peek of what the Android app might look like and how it might function. From an anonymous tipster, there’s no telling that this is real however, it does seem to follow the same design cues that seemed present in the Play Store 4.0 redesign.
The screenshots seem to show a sort of combination of the Talk app and the card-centric design that was ushered in with Google Now. There seems to be a whole lot of integration with other Google services as well, if you take a look at the second screenshot. There are icons for Drive, YouTube, and what looks like a lightbulb for Google Keep integration. It’d make a lot of sense for Google to integrate all of these things straight into their Babble app for Android. Apple have had iMessage in place for a long time now and BlackBerries messaging system has always been integrated well. Could Google Babble be launched alongside Android 5.0 as a milestone feature to usher in a more unified platform from Google?
I’m no expert, but it looks like these screenshots were taken on a Samsung device, which could mean that Babble will be made available to previous versions of Android. The likelihood of someone testing this on a Samsung device, and leaking images though, is pretty slim. Google Now was launched for Android 4.1, but never – officially – made its way backwards which was, for those stuck on Android 4.0, a bit of a slap in the face. It appears that there’s some sort of voting feature thrown in there as well, which could tie into Google Keep?
This could be an elaborately faked mock-up, after all something this is bound to go down well with Android fans. Higher resolution images would help to decide but, this does look like a product out of Google. Having said that, they’re more than likely ‘shopped to hell, after all why would Google be testing something on a Samsung device? If anything, it’s starting to look like Android is going to be given a makeover of sorts come this year’s I/O.
Forget what I think though, what do you guys think?