The good folks at Android Police take a look at the code of recently updated Google applications at a chance of peeking into the near future in terms of what the apps will have to offer. The Hangouts app for Android is the most recent victim of the APK Teardown (as they like to call it), and they've uncovered a tantalising treat as at what is to come.
Activity Statuses
IM statuses of yesteryear allowed you to set custom messages as well as online status (available/busy/away/offline), features which Hangouts infamously lacks, currently at least. Snippets of code uncovered by Android Police indicate that an automated form of this feature is in the works.
- Walking
- Cycling
- Driving
- Phone
- Tablet
- Computer
- In a call
- In a video call
+Artem Russakovskii speculates that these icons may be in use for automated statuses in the near future. Wouldn't it be awesome to have your status change to "Driving" or "In a call" automatically, without any user input? It would certainly help contacts decide how best to contact you.
Aside from activity statuses, it seems like you may be able to set your mood using none other than Hangouts' emojis of course, which would be a natural evolvement of the "Moods" feature that has been in the Google+ Android app for 9 months.The code reviewed doesn't happen to be ready yet, but we should expect that both parts of rich statuses (activities and moods) will roll out together at some point in the near future. It's just a matter of when.
I recommend reading the full APK Teardown, and adding +Android Police to your circles.
What are your thoughts on the possible new features for Hangouts? Happy to see statuses back or not that fussed? Let us know in the comments!
Source and some images: Android Police