Apps

Google optimizes Drive and Docs apps on Android to improve the foldable experience

June 12, 2023

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Google has announced a couple of new updates for Google Drive on Android aimed at enabling a more cohesive design between web and mobile, as well as improving the experience with foldables.

The first of these updates optimizes the Google Drive app for foldable devices by implementing a visual tweak. The item preview viewer now contains controls that will intelligently respond to the position of the foldable device, depending on whether it is opened, closed, or even partially opened. Once it detects the correct position, the viewer and the controls will adjust themselves accordingly.

Source – Google Workspace Blog

This will be particularly helpful if you are using a device such as a Galaxy Z Fold or any of the upcoming foldables. One notable folding smartphone that will be benefitting from this change is Google’s own upcoming Pixel Fold, which should be arriving later this month to those that pre-ordered.

Additionally, if you use Google Docs on an Android device, you will now see your docs in paginated mode when you first open them. There is one exception to this and that is if the document has already been set up to open in “pageless” mode.

Pageless mode sets up your document so that it continuously scrolls without any page breaks, images adjusts to your screen size, and wide tables can be fully viewed by scrolling to the left and right. In contrast, paginated mode shows your document with pages and page breaks. This view was previously not available on mobile.

Source – Google Workspace Blog

Google has been slowly but surely updating their own apps to take advantage of the larger real estate on tablets and foldables as well as adjusting the layout of said apps to make more sense to the user. It will be interesting to see what other tweaks are in the pipeline for Google Apps, and any app for that matter, now that foldables are becoming more mainstream.

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