Google could soon change the way you answer your phone calls (APK teardown)

Nowadays, Android phones are used for a myriad of tasks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people forgot that their phones can still make phone calls. Much of our communication now happens through texts and social media, but taking calls remains an important reason to get a phone. If you use your phone a lot for calls, you’d also be accustomed to the gestures used for answering and rejecting calls, and it’s one of those things that hasn’t changed much over the years. But sometimes it does, and it seems we’ve spotted Google rethinking the gestures and UI used for answering calls.

With Phone v166.0.735169223 beta, Google is testing a new interface for answering incoming calls.

Currently, when you receive an incoming call on your phone (which has the Google Phone app installed and not any OEM Phone app with the same name), the Google Phone app displays a button with the phone icon. You can swipe up to answer the call or swipe down to reject the call. You can see the current UI in the screenshots below:

The new test uses a left-right sliding mechanism from the centered icon. You can slide left to decline the call or slide right to accept it.

You can see the new incoming call interface in action below:

I’ve seen this UI on custom ROMs in the past, so this hit me with quite some nostalgia. I wouldn’t say this is better or worse than the current swipe up and down, but it will require some muscle memory retraining. Unless people were complaining about the existing gesture, there’s no real reason to change this as it brings unnecessary and avoidable inconvenience. Remember that the Google Phone app is preloaded on phones like Google’s own Pixels and those from other OEMs like Xiaomi and OnePlus, so the change would affect many people.

Google had previously been testing a different UI for incoming calls, more closely aping iOS 18’s call screen. It’s unclear which UI we’ll finally end up with, if at all Google proceeds with the change.