Google Contacts may soon receive helpful reachability updates

The majority of the greatest Android phones are bulky yet portable slabs of glass, making it challenging to reach all display edges without using your second thumb. One-handed mode on Android, an accessibility feature, helps by scaling down the entire display, but does so at the expense of a sizable portion of the screen. With a few crucial user interface (UI) adjustments, Google Contacts could soon join the select group of apps that have successfully designed their way around reachability problems.

In all circumstances, when you might need to access an app by yourself, surrounding it with black borders isn’t the best choice. When apps are scaled to fill the screen of your smartphone, they become more difficult to use with a single thumb because most of them include UI elements that are dispersed throughout the display. One of the main tenets of the original Samsung One UI was to ameliorate this circumstance. In a more recent effort to enhance its appearance, Google Chrome added a bottom-aligned Omnibox for iOS that looks a lot like Chrome Home from 2020.

With the next December Pixel feature drop, we also hope to see a smaller search bar on Pixel smartphones. AssembleDebug, a well-known feature leaker, has now revealed Google Contacts may soon relocate UI elements to make the app easier to operate one-handedly. First, a few functions have been moved from the three-dot overflow menu to the bottom of the contact’s page, including reminders, block numbers, and route to voicemail.

Google may also remove chips from the top of the combined list of all your contacts to sort them by source, such as phone contacts and email contacts. Currently, this functionality is flag-controlled, indicating that the firm is still undecided about whether to use it. However, a future version of Google Contacts may remove these chips. For contacts you use frequently, Google might also put a persistent chip at the bottom with the option to add that contact to your favorites.

You can use developer tools to enable these flags in the most recent beta of Google Contacts, or you can just wait for the stable update of the app with the same set of capabilities after testing is through.