Google’s Gboard could be getting an auto dark theme and a battery saver feature in an upcoming update judging by details found in the APKs code from the latest version of the app. There’s not a whole lot of information about these two features yet but it would seem that the two go hand-in-hand. The battery saver feature will, as the name suggests, be intended to help reduce the amount of battery consumption when your device’s power is already running low, and in doing so may disable the use of certain things like stickers and bitmoji. This is where the auto dark theme comes in as it seems the dark theme will automatically be enabled whenever the battery saver feature is turned on.
Whether or not users will have complete control over how these two things function is still unclear, and it’s entirely possible that users may be able to toggle battery saver to pop on when the battery life gets down to a certain point, while leaving the dark theme off, or simply keep the battery saver disabled altogether. In addition to these two changes, Google is making some changes to the GIF feature in Gboard.
If you’re a fan of GIFs and attempt to send them in messages and chats and comment boards any chance you get, Google is putting some focus on you here. The ability to add GIFs to chats and such from Gboard has been available for a while now, but what hasn’t been possible is to add text to those GIFs. That appears to be changing as a newer version of Gboard will seemingly be adding the ability to layer text on top of the GIFs you plan to post, letting you add some more context to the GIF before sending it out into the world. This might be helpful for those times that a GIF might be a little cryptic, but still funny. Google is also adding new effects to the recently added “make a GIF” feature, so if you’ve played with that at all there will be a little more to it down the road. There’s also upcoming support for a bunch of new languages it looks like, including Vietnamese and Balkan.