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Google Photos is getting a video player makeover: New UI, features revealed (APK teardown)
- Google Photos is set to introduce a revamped video player UI, featuring distinct Volume, Pause, and new Loop buttons for improved user experience.
- The updated seek bar has a new dotted design and provides haptic feedback, enhancing video scrubbing functionality.
- Users will be able to double-tap the video’s left and right sides to rewind or fast-forward by five seconds, adding more intuitive controls.
Google is constantly adding new features to its Photos app. Thanks to our contributor, Assemble Debug, we’ve once again spotted some tweaks coming to Google Photos. The tipster dug into the latest version of the Photos app for Android and activated a more modern UI for the video player along with some new controls.
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.
To start with, the look of the video player is getting a makeover in Google Photos. It now appears more polished, with separate Volume, Pause, and Loop buttons presented underneath the video. In its current, un-updated state, the Pause button is overlaid on the video, while the volume button appears on the right. The Loop button in the updated UI is brand new and allows users to turn the feature off and on while watching a video.
Google Photos current Video Player UI
The updated Google Photos video player UI also features a new seek bar that lets you scroll to different parts of a video. Not only has its design changed from the regular straight-line seek bar to a dotted version, but it also provides nice haptic feedback when scrubbing through a video.
Google Photos New Video Player UI
Lastly, the updated video player lets you double-tap on the left and right sides to rewind or forward a video by five seconds.
All these changes could be coming to the Google Photos app in the near future. We managed to get them going on version 7.4 of the Google Photos app, but we needed to play around with the app a bit to make that happen. We’ll let you know if and when Google makes the new video player features available more widely.