Gboard’s emoji picker could be about to get some overdue attention

If you’re not peppering your conversations with a healthy dose of emoji, are you really living your best life? Sure, we can get away with dry, old text, but dropping in a few well-chosen emoji doesn’t just add a welcome dose of color to you conversation, but can quickly communicate sometimes complicated subjects. Gboard already integrates a very useful emoji picker, and now Google’s working on giving that UI some extra space.

Today we’re looking at version 16.4.3.827411866-beta-arm64-v8a beta of the Gboard app, and while the changes we’re talking about aren’t yet user-facing, we’re able to bring you an early look at these still in-development tweaks.

Already, when you use Gboard to add media like an animated GIF or a sticker to a message, the UI responds to you scrolling through those options by auto-hiding the navigation bar at the bottom. That’s great, offering you a little extra screen real estate to spot the one you’re looking for, but what about emoji?

As you can see in our demo above, Google is working to bring this same behavior to the emoji picker. As you scroll down the list, that bar will quickly dive out of your way, and pop back up when you start scrolling in the other direction. It’s not the biggest change in the world, sure, but it makes sense to see Google finally getting around to making this behavior match what we already had with GIFs and stickers.

Beyond this emoji picker tweak, we’ve also identified a couple other in-development changes. Staying with this same screen, we can see Google working on some small changes to its color palette choices for buttons and backgrounds. While we’ve recently seen Google largely working to enhance contrast in its apps, these adjustments feel like they’re moving in the opposite direction — just an aesthetic choice, maybe?

The new coloring scheme is in the works for both light and dark mode.

Finally, remember that new Gboard apostrophe behavior we previewed for you about a month ago? That one’s still not active, but we’ve spotted of progress, with devs preparing the notice that will let users know about the change:

So, no promises, but we’d expect to see this one arriving sooner than later. In any case, we’ll keep an eye on future betas and try to spot any more progress in this direction.