Microsoft on Thursday announced a major update for the Android version of OneNote. The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant improved its note-taking app with a simplified set of controls, in addition to enhancing it with a number of design changes that are meant to provide a more consistent user experience of OneNote across the entire range of platforms that are compatible with the company’s productivity tool, including Android. The firm also reworked some elements of the app in an effort to make the service more accessible to users who rely on assistive technologies.
With the latest update, OneNote developers moved the document navigation controls to the left side of the user interface across all supported devices, stating that this design change should facilitate the process of switching between notes for users with disabilities, as well as enhance productivity by putting the main content of the app in the very center of the screen. Other consistency-oriented changes are individually minor, but they add up and result in less variation between the user experience of different OneNote variants, with Microsoft stating that this redesign should be particularly useful for students and educational workers who rely on OneNote in environments with a wide variety of devices. By making the look of OneNote more consistent across platforms, developers are hoping to assist users in quickly switching between different systems. The tech giant said that the new OneNote update was based on a large volume of user feedback obtained from “hundreds” of interviewees, as well as a number of telemetry-related findings.
All of the new changes and additions to OneNote will be distributed to Android users via a client-side update of the app that will start rolling out on the Google Play Store in the “coming weeks,” Microsoft said, without providing a more specific time frame to accompany that announcement. The upcoming software package for OneNote is also expected to ship with a number of bug fixes and performance improvements that are customary for major updates of Microsoft’s apps. More details on the company’s suite of mobile apps for Android will likely be available later this year.