The latest version of the Google Duo app — build version 17 — hints at additional camera settings and some other improvements that the Alphabet-owned company is presumably looking to debut in the near future, as suggested by a recent APK teardown of the service. The code found in the new app suggests that the video Settings section of Google Duo may soon be ennobled with three additional color options – White Balance, Color Effects, and Exposure Compensation. The White Balance setting is relatively self-explanatory, being set to allow users to change the color balance of their video feed with the goal of either fixing a tinted display caused by any particular lighting type or simply creating a digital effect. The Setting itself won’t allow you granular control over your white balance and is instead simply meant to provide you with a number of presets like Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Incandescent, and Auto.
The Exposure Compensation setting will provide users with more in-depth control over their image exposure as it will seemingly be managed with a simple slider, whereas Color Effects will be more automated in nature and ship with filter presets like Sepia, Aqua, Whiteboard, and Mono. It’s currently unclear when Google might activate the new camera settings on the user side of things, though more details on the matter may follow shortly. The Google Duo version 17 also ships with an image asset depicting a smoothie doodle that can be seen in the gallery below, though no known method of activating this Easter egg have yet been revealed.
While the aforementioned changes are still only code references, the app’s frontend did receive one notable addition with the latest update in the form of Adaptive Icons support, as well as a new round icon that the majority of Google’s other mobile offerings have already adopted. Support for Adaptive Icons is just the latest addition to Google Duo that’s meant to make the app more compatible with Android 8.0 Oreo, the latest stable iteration of Google’s omnipresent mobile operating system which was officially released earlier this month. A couple of weeks back, the video calling app was also updated with support for Notification Channels, another feature exclusive to Android 8.0 Oreo which allows users to categorize notifications and manage them in a granular manner.
