Major revamp of the Google app starts rolling out to Android users

The Google Feed, Google's revamp and rebrand of its "Google Now" card feed inside of the Google app, is rolling out to Android users. The Feed is mostly a new coat of paint for features that already existed, but let's cover what's here.

The first is the new tabbed-Feed interface. Open the Google app and at the bottom you'll see three sets of tabs: "Home," "Upcoming," and "Recent." "Home" is the news feed, showing suggested articles based on your search history. The "Upcoming" tab contains cards based on your calendar, e-mails, reminders, and suggested travel times. Finally there's the "Recents" tab, which is basically your search history designed to look like the iOS recent app screen.

Besides using your searches to auto-subscribe you to news topics, there's also an explicit "Follow topics" card you can tap on to manually tell Google what you like. This can be individual sports teams, TV shows, movies, and other topics. You can also really drill down into some topics, like technology, which lets you pick from things like "Cryptocurrency," "Space exploration," and "Virtual Reality."

Not everyone is happy with the new Feed design. The old design would mix the "upcoming" and "news" cards together in a big list, intelligently sorting important "upcoming" cards (like an imminent calendar appointment) above the news. The predictive cards were Google Now's most unique feature, but this design gives top billing to the "news" cards and hides the predictive cards under a secondary screen. The new design also removes the ability to swipe away news cards—if you want to dismiss something, you have to tap on the menu.

The Feed revamp also comes with a home screen panel for Pixel Launcher users. Instead of being a clone of the primary Google app interface, this now sports its own design, with a much smaller, single-line search bar and a slightly transparent background, which lets the wallpaper peek through. You can jump to the tabbed interface by tapping on a box icon next to the search bar.

Google's wishy-washy rollout system means there's no hard "launch date," and Google's millions of A/B tests and beta releases mean that some people have had tastes of these new interfaces for some time. It looks like Google has finally settled on this design, though, and judging by the slew of comments (and complaints!) on Android Police and Reddit, this design has started rolling out to the majority of users.