When Google Photos launched earlier this year during Google I/O 2015, it was a big, shiny and new service offering for Google born out of Google+ Photos. For many, it was just an upgrade over something they already had, but for new users, it was something pretty useful, if not revolutionary. For those that still remember what a roll of film is, the idea of Google Photos must truly seem like something out of the future. Forget the whole automatic and unlimited backup of your photos, being able to search for a name or a type of photo and be handed those right to you is a powerful feature that Google should be exploiting further. For users, it looks like Photos is about to get a little better, at least that’s what a teardown of the latest Google Photos apps suggests.
As usual, the folks over at Android Police have taken a digital scalpel to the latest version of Photos, that’s 1.5.0.103330409 to be precise. The latest version hints at two new upcoming features concerning photos themselves, namely being able to attach names to people and a ‘Collaboration’ feature. The latter seems like a mix of Google Docs and Google Photos, as the strings inside the APK indicate this could be used to let more than person work and review an album of photos. Just as on the desktop, a link will be pasted to the clipboard on Android, to be given to friends and family.
The big deal here however, are hints dropped by Google that support for Casting content to either a Chromecast or Android TV box is coming soon. In this latest APK teardown, Android Police found a single string and images of the Cast icon in various states of connecting, connected and disconnected. Considering the popularity and low price of the Chromecast we would have thought Google would have added this into Photos by now. Still, the service is still fairly new compared to other services from Google, but they have to be working on something for Cast if these icons are now included the APK. Either way, it looks like Photos is starting to get some new features, and we should see these as well as others launch in the near future, hopefully.