Google have had a busy morning, cranking up the old rollout machine to update a number of their Android applications, including Hangouts and now Gmail. The Gmail update doesn’t add much in the way of functionality, but it gives the UI a bit of a polish, slightly darkening the action bar icons and ditching the transparency effect on the widget for starters.
More noticeably, email threads now feature the card-style UI that Google are gradually incorporating into all their applications, breaking up each message into its own card. It certainly looks cleaner than the old version, but I’m not convinced that it’ll be as useful, as previous messages are hidden behind a generic ‘x older messages’, rather than displaying the sender’s name as before.
Another, and more helpful change, is that when you select emails in the inbox view, the contact picture changes to a tick to more easily identify which messages have been selected.
The updates are rolling out at the moment, and most people should see the update within the next few days.
