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Google is getting ready to let you make your collections of saved favorites public (APK teardown)
- Collections & saved items in the Google app let you store and organize your favorite content.
- Currently you have the option to create private sharing links, to show your collections to friends.
- Google could soon let you make collections publicly viewable through your Google profile.
There is a whole world of fantastic content out there, and not nearly enough time to appreciate it all, nor share it with everyone we’d like to. That’s just one of the reasons why we love it when apps give us tools for keeping track of all this stuff, even if it’s something as simple as a browser letting us bookmark a site for later. One solution that you may not even be very aware of lives behind the “Saved” button at the bottom of your Google app, where you can keep track of websites and images you like, grouping them together in what Google calls “collections.” And now it looks like Google could be working to give us new tools for sharing these collections with others.
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.
By default, Google groups together web links and images you save by tapping the ribbon icon associated with this feature, creating collections for each. It will also automatically generate a few special collections when you add relevant links, like a cookbook collection featuring all your saved recipes. And when those don’t suffice, you can manually set up a new collection for whatever you want and add just the items you wish.
Right now, collections are private by default, and only you can see the stuff you saved. But Google knows that half the point of saving things is sharing them with others later, so you can easily toggle on a sharing mode that lets you distribute links to individual collections — you even have the option to make those view-only, or invite your friends to contribute by adding new stuff.
That’s fine for what it is, but it’s also very hands-on, requiring you to distribute those sharing links to everyone you’d like to have access. But looking into version 16.1.38.sa.arm64 of the Google app on Android, we find evidence for a new sharing mode that would allow you to share collections through your Google profile.
When you write reviews or participate in discussions on Google Search, that content appears in your Google profile, and you can choose to have it publicly facing, or set to private. Now it seems that you may be able to start sharing your collections there, too. This option is not yet available within the Google app, but we were able to coax it into making the early appearance you see above, with the option to set a newly created collection as public.
We don’t yet know exactly how those collections might look on your profile once this is all live, nor if there might also be an option for the sort of “edit” access available now via privately shared links. With any luck, it might not be too long before we find out, though.