If you’re using Android, there’s a pretty good chance you’re using Gmail as your mail service and/or client. And for the most part, it’s a pretty good piece of software, with Google making huge efforts to constantly add new features to improve the experience.
Of course, new additions don’t always need to be over the top in order to make a huge impact. With that said, Gmail is now adding a new way to preview attachments on Android. As you can imagine, this is going to be a pretty big deal, allowing users to get more information at a glance than ever before.
Something small, but also big
The feature was spotted by 9to5Google, sharing that going forward, when a new notification comes in, you’ll now have a better idea of what type of information that email contains thanks to a new notification style on Android.
When there’s an email with an image, you’ll be able to see a small thumbnail of that image in the notification, and when you expand it, the image will get larger. However, the news outlet does highlight a downside to this approach, with text that used to show in the preview no longer being present when an image preview is present.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag here because the words of an email are just as important as any image that might be sent. Hopefully, Google will be able to tweak this with a future release and find some kind of compromise. For other types of attachments, like a PDF, it will just show the file type and file name.
Despite this already being available, 9to5Google notes that it wasn’t able to replicate this behavior on all its devices. So, there’s a good chance that it’s slowly being rolled out or only available for specific accounts. But, if this interests you, we recommend checking your Gmail app to see if it’s available.
As stated before, Gmail is going to be the go-to app for most people on Android. The integration with Google services is tight, and it’s even better if you’re running on Android. You can even tweak it to get an even better experience. However, there are other options that might be worth exploring.
If you’ve never explored outside Gmail, we recommend giving it a try. There are plenty of great options, but one called Notion that we recently experimented with really made us contemplate leaving Gmail.
