Wishes to Google
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I use Google products for just about everything and send routine feature requests of the form “I wish [something] because [some reason].” Here is my list from 2019.
- Drive: I wish there was an app shortcut/intent to go directly to my recents and one for my starred
- Fit: I wish there was an app icon shortcut for ‘Add Activity’ so I could add it to my home screen
- Google App: I wish Weather supported dark mode
- Podcasts: I wish there was automatic downloading. I also wish there was an app shortcut intent to go straight to new episodes. I wish podcasts data usage was separate from the rest of the Google app.
- Gmail: I wish I could quickly toggle off conversation view for when I am looking for emails from a specific person, so that I can see each message they sent including the subject, clipped message and date (instead of the chain.)
- Chrome: I wish I could more easily toggle ‘Darken Websites’ and ‘Lite Mode’. Maybe if space allowed, toggle icons could be added to the home bar
- News: I wish Google News inherited my dark mode settings from Chrome (beta) For example I’m Chrome beta bostonglobe.com is presented with a dark background, but embedded in Google News it is a white background
- Search Console: I wish there was a toggle for the domain list dropdown to show only domain properties, to reduce scrolling.
- Gmail: I wish the search box would show more recent searches, as long as there is more vertical screen space available.
- Photos: I wish new faces were recognized within a day. I got a new dog and I want to create an auto-updating face album but the face hasn’t been recognized yet after 2 or so weeks. In the absence of that, I wish I could nudge/force/hint a certain face.