Google Contacts "Besties" label hints at new relationship options (Update: Pixel Besties)

Update, August 16, 2024 (10:05 AM ET): The feature within the Google Contacts app could be called “Pixel Besties,” as spotted in some new strings.

The Pixel Besties feature could seemingly make it easier to view your communication history with the people who matter the most to you. We hope to learn more about the feature in the future as the functionality gets built.

Original article, August 1, 2024 (12:15 PM ET): Relationships are much more than about who you know. The surface-level details — things like name, phone number, and where they live — don’t matter nearly as much as how this person has come to be in your life. Is this a work colleague? A relative? As we expect our smartphones and the apps that run on them to automate more and more tasks, the details of these relationships can really start to matter — an email being drafted to an academic advisor should probably care more about grammar and formality than one going out to your bestie. How’s a phone supposed to tell all these people apart?

Google already gives you a few ways to define relationships. In Contacts right now, you’ll find a menu that lets you choose from a bunch of relationship types: parent, child, spouse, generic “relative,” and a few more. But you’ve got to dig quite a bit to even get to that field, and we wonder how many users bother going through their contacts and populating all this info.

We’ve also got the ability to put a label on relationships in Google Assistant, letting you tell your phone “call mom,” when she’s in your Contacts list under her actual name. A couple years back, we saw Google start connecting these two, as it integrated this Assistant data into Contacts. So where does that leave us now?

Looking through Google Contacts version 4.37.39, we’re able to access a few screens that deal with people you’ve identified as your “Besties.” 9to5Google was able to trigger a besties widget in Contacts about a month ago, which just looked like a rebranded version of the favorite contacts widgets. We’re now able to get the app to show a bestie reference on individual contact cards, and access a link to “Besties Onboarding.”

Problem is, right now, that just crashes the app. But even in failure we can find room to learn, and looking at the crash dump we find reference to a mysterious com.google.android.apps.pixel.relationships package. That’s not the first time we’ve come across reference to that in Contacts, and its presence here makes us wonder if Google is planning to introduce some new, overarching way of keeping track of relationships in the near future.

Finally, just a note, Google: “bestie” is superlative. You literally cannot have more than one best friend.