Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Photos may be working on a way to comment in shared albums with one fewer tap.
- A floating comment would allow viewers to engage with each other right from the album view.
- Right now, viewers have to hit the speech bubble icon in the top-right to leave a comment.
For Android users, sharing pics doesn’t get much easier than using Google Photos. Considering so many of use it to keep our memories safe in the cloud already, putting together shareable albums is as simple as a few more taps. Initial support for shared albums arrived nearly a decade ago, back in 2015, and just the next year, Google added the ability for viewers to comment on albums, making the whole experience a lot more social. Fast-forward to today, and it looks like Google could be preparing a little tweak to make that kind of commenting just the slightest bit easier.
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.
Looking into Google Photos version 6.94, we spotted some software flags that, when enabled, cause the app to display a floating comment bar while you’re viewing albums. Now, normally, when you want to tell you your buddy how sweet their vacation pics look, you’d tap the speech bubble icon at the top-right of the screen, bringing up the comments section and allowing you to add one of your own. With the right flags set, the app instead gives you the option to reply directly from the album view, with the new floating bar you see here:
Sure, that doesn’t mean much from a functional perspective, but for users who might not be aware they can leave comments at all, even a small tweak like this has the potential to lead to a meaningful boost in engagement.
As with all discoveries of this nature, we don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves in guessing what the final result might look like. It’s entirely possible that this floating bar just represents one component of a broader refresh to commenting in Photos albums. It could also be nothing more than an insider experiment that has little chance of ever seeing the official light of day. That might be a shame, though, as this seems like a painless, user-friendly tweak — the kind we always like to see.
