Google to Redesign Gboard Toolbar With New Customisation Options: Report

Google, in an attempt to unify its design language, may bring some updates soon to the standard Android keyboard. Reportedly Google has begun redesigning the appearance of Gboard while giving consumers more customisation options, as noticed in beta version 12.6.06.491625702. Previously, to customise the buttons that showed up in Gboard’s quick access toolbar, users had to tap a three-dot menu icon near the top-right corner of the keyboard. This option has now been relocated to the menu bar’s left edge and supplanted with a button depicting four squares with rounded corners.

An Android Police report said that the new features on the Gborad designed by Google are accessible by tapping the revamped menu button. It added that users would now notice an emoji option and a language selector that weren’t previously available. They can also re-arrange the icons in this overflow menu by dragging them around, and can still shift items to and from the quick access toolbar to alter which options show up when they first open the keyboard.

The report added that rather than being limited to four shortcuts, users can add as many as they want to the quick access toolbar. The voice search button, however, has undergone the most significant change — users can now drag any item into this slot to substitute the microphone icon with a personalised entry, according to the report.

In addition, this update adds a new Privacy menu to Gboard’s settings, the report added. This menu contains no new options — in fact, it’s mostly crowded with settings accessible in the now-defunct Advanced menu — but a separate entry for dealing with Google’s data collection is effective.

These features have been discovered in Gboard’s most recent beta update, version 12.6.06.491625702, but there seems to be a server-side component restricting access. Users can get the update on the beta channel by pressing the Join button on Gboard’s Play Store page or can sideload the latest edition from APKMirror.