Google Photos is next for an Expressive overhaul, but is it actually better? (APK teardown)
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- An Android Authority teardown has revealed a couple of key visual changes coming to the Google Photos app.
- It looks like the app will get a new video player featuring larger controls and gestures to rewind and fast-forward.
- The app could also get an overhauled search results page, but I’m not completely sold on this change.
Google is working on wide-spanning visual changes to Android 16 using its Material 3 Expressive style. We’ve since discovered that several Google apps are getting these tweaks. Now, it looks like Google Photos is getting a couple of visual updates as well.
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.
We conducted a teardown of the latest version of the Google Photos app (version 7.32.0.765953717) and enabled a couple of redesigned UI elements. Perhaps the most notable change is the overhauled video player, as seen below.
The most prominent change is the larger player timeline, complete with a vertical line for a scrubbing icon. The video duration now appears above the timeline, too, along with the pause and volume controls. Another notable change is that the new video player now displays the file’s time and date at the top of the page, while the cast icon has disappeared. We’ve also got an Add to button at the bottom, alongside the existing Share, Edit, and Trash buttons.
One more nifty addition to the new Google Photos video player UI is the ability to hold on the left or right sides of the video to rewind or fast-forward, respectively. You can check this out in the third image above, which shows a 2x alert at the top of the screen.
These aren’t the only UI changes we’ve spotted in Google Photos. The company is also working on a redesigned search results page. You can view the old and new pages below.
The new search results page brings the search bar to the bottom of the screen while also grouping the “best match” items in a square gallery. This gallery takes up just over half of the screen, with the rest of the screen showing recent matches by date (e.g. April 3, January 26). However, you can tap the last image in this square gallery to reveal an expanded gallery view.
By contrast, the current Google Photos search results page shows all matches in one big gallery while letting you switch between Most recent and Best match. The current gallery clearly shows far more matches at once from the get-go compared to the new UI. This suggests that you’ll find your desired results more quickly in the current UI.
This isn’t the first time we discovered a redesigned Google Photos video player. We uncovered a redesign back in October 2024, but that tweaked player wasn’t actually released. Therefore, there’s no guarantee that this most recent visual overhaul will see the light of day, either. But it certainly seems in line with Google’s Material 3 Expressive stylings, so we’re optimistic about a wide release at some point.
This isn’t the only Google app slated to receive a visual overhaul for Android 16. We’ve also uncovered upcoming design changes for apps like Gmail, the Phone app, and Google One.
