Google Play Games, Photos updates offer hints at upcoming features
Play Games may soon be the home for streaming your Android games to YouTube Gaming. And Google Photos may make it easier to group pictures together and let others edit your albums.
Why this matters:Google often does some of the prep work with app updates, even though the features might be planned for a future release. Peeking at what’s contained inside the code gives you a nice preview at what’s to come and how Google is positioning the apps’ capabilities.
We know that Google is planning on bringing YouTube Gaming streaming to Android, as the company recently launched the feature in Japan. However, Android Police found code in the version 1.5 release of Google Play Games indicates how Google may pull this off here. It appears that much of the work resides with Play Games, which Google could use to help you tag or invite others to game sessions.
The overall plan appears to be that YouTube Gaming will be the app you use to watch gaming streams, while Play Games will be the dashboard for sharing your own action.
Grab Google Play Games version 3.3 from the Play Store or APK Mirror.
Google Photos may soon expand the sharing capabilities. The report indicates that Google is working on some type of album collaboration feature, which would allow you to give another access to modify and edit pictures in an album. Currently you’re just able to share a batch of photos with a link.
Also, some type of labeling feature may appear to permanently identify individuals in your photo collection. Currently, Google Photos can recognize a person and group photos of that individual, but you can’t give him or her a name. With this new capability, you may be able to search for photos of “John” or “Annie” once you’ve identified them in your albums.
Finally, support for Chromecast is also in the works. Though that can’t get here soon enough as it feels like a feature that should be here already considering these are all Google products that ought to work together easily.
Get Google Photos version 1.5 from the Play Store or APK Mirror.