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Upgrading your phone? Google Photos could get a little easier to set up (APK teardown)
April 23, 2025
- Google is working on a new onboarding/setup screen for Google Photos.
- The new screen offers a toggle to use mobile data, clarifies backup quality, and emphasizes your profile photo.
- This should make life a little easier when first setting up Google Photos on a device.
We’ve spotted plenty of changes and tweaks to Google Photos in the last few months. Now, it looks like the photo backup app is getting a notable UI change for new users or people upgrading to a new Android phone.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We rifled through a recent version of Google Photos for Android (version 7.26) and discovered that Google is working on an overhauled onboarding screen. This new screen should show up when you launch Google Photos for the first time on your device. We also managed to enable this new screen and compared it to the current menu, as seen below.
The new onboarding/setup screen now emphasizes the user’s profile photo, for one. There’s also a toggle to use mobile data for backups when you’re not connected to Wi-Fi. That means you don’t have to tap Photos settings > Backup > Mobile data usage to access this toggle when setting things up on a new device.
Google’s new screen also has fine print that notes that your photos and videos will be backed up in Original quality. You’ll still need to dive into the settings menu to tweak the backup quality. In any event, this overhauled screen looks like a more useful menu, so we hope Google actually implements it.
This latest UI change follows several other upcoming Google Photos changes we spotted in recent months. Other notable tweaks in the pipeline include the ability to upgrade photos to Ultra HDR, and album sharing via QR code.