Google Contacts just got two upgrades that'll help you clean up your address book
TL;DR Google Contacts has recently started rolling out a couple changes we spotted in development earlier this year.
Contact pages are picking up a new 'Recent activity' list, displaying message and call history.
The app's settings add a new toggle to control whether or not you see view-only contacts from other apps.
Our phones are full of apps we don't spend nearly enough time paying attention to, yet are critical for everything we do with them on a day-to-day basis. We would absolutely include Google Contacts on that list, as while it's incredibly easy to overlook its functionality, it helps empower us to communicate and share our favorite content with the people who matter to us most. Over the past few months we've identified some worthwhile-looking upgrades in development that should only further enhance the Contacts experience, and couple of them are rolling out now.
Let's start with the first we spotted, as we found evidence back at the end of April pointing to work on a new 'Recent activity' section for your contacts. While we knew about the app's ability to report on recent activity through its widgets, it looked like Contacts was working to add a similar report to individual contact pages within the app itself. And this week, we're now seeing exactly that change become widely available.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
While we could already access a lot of this history in individual apps directly, having a central repository in Contacts makes a lot of sense.
More recently, just last month, we shared with you that Contacts was working on a handy solution for managing increasingly messy lists of contacts, thanks to a new setting that would let you control how view-only contacts from other apps were displayed.
These contacts are created with information that comes from other apps, and like the clearly implies, you can't edit these directly in Contacts. While we normally prefer to have them hidden away, we can imagine edge cases where we're trying to resolve contact details between entries in Contacts itself and these external ones, where being able to see them all in once place could really help.
Just like recent activity, we're also now seeing this change present in Contacts, showing up at the bottom of the app's settings. IF you're still waiting for it, make sure your Contacts app is up to date in the Play Store.
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