TL;DR
- Google is developing a Pinterest clone within the Google app, which will soon include a new “Images” tab.
- Users will be able to select their topics of interest, and Google will then populate the new tab with relevant, inspirational images curated from Search.
- Users will be able to share the images, save them to a collection, search them with Google Lens, or hide them from their feeds.
Ahead of Google I/O, The Information reported that Google planned to announce a Pinterest-like feature to show people images and help them curate ideas for topics like fashion or interior design. However, at the time, we didn’t know what this feature would look like, where it would appear, or how it would work.
After conducting an extensive APK teardown of the latest version of the Google app, version 16.20.48.sa.arm64, we were able to uncover Google’s upcoming Pinterest clone, which didn’t make it to I/O. The feature is very much a work in progress, but the images and videos we’ll provide here should give you a good sense of what it’ll do and how.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Google’s take on Pinterest, a platform that allows users to pin images to a digital pinboard, will appear in the Google app as a new “Images” tab. As you can see in the screenshots of the feature below (and the video above), the images in this tab will refresh daily.
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When you first launch the new “Images” tab in the Google app, you’ll be asked to select at least three topics, like “Women’s fashion,” “Food & Drink,” and “Home Decor,” to create your personalized image feed. Google will then use publicly available images from Search to fill this tab.
You can long-press an image to share it, save it to your collection, search it with Google Lens, or hide it from your feed if you don’t think it belongs there.
As we said before, this feature is very much a work in progress right now. In our testing, instead of showing images from the selected topics, it’s currently displaying random images from various topics. We’re guessing Google will iron out these kinks before the feature is ready for prime time.
