Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
In summary
- 'Besties' in Contacts will soon offer you a new way to identify your closest friends.
- Although we find several references in the app, nothing is functional at the moment.
- This may be part of a broader effort by Google to provide you with the ability to manage relationships.
Update, August 16, 2024 (10:05 a.m. ET): The feature within the Google Contacts app could be called “Pixel Besties,” as seen in some new text.
Code
<string name="pixel_besties">Pixel Besties</string>
<string name="supporting_text_menu_besties">View your recent communications and memories with your favorite people</string>The Pixel Besties feature could seemingly make it easier to view your communication history with the people who matter most to you. We hope to learn more about the feature in the future as the functionality is built.
Original article, August 1, 2024 (12:15 PM ET): Relationships are much more than just WHO You know. The superficial details — things like name, phone number, where they live — don't matter nearly as much as How This person has entered your life. Is it a coworker? A family member? As we expect our smartphones and the apps that run on them to automate more and more tasks, the details of these relationships may really matter — an email to a guidance counselor might need to be more concerned with grammar and formality than an email to your best friend. How is a phone supposed to keep all these people straight?
A APK disassembly helps predict features that might appear on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, such predicted features may not make it into a public release.
Google already gives you a few ways to define relationships. In Contacts, you’ll now find a menu that lets you choose from a bunch of relationship types: parent, child, spouse, generic “relative,” and a few more. But you have to dig pretty deep to even get to that field, and we wonder how many users bother to go through their contacts and fill in all that information.
We also have the ability to label relationships in Google Assistant, so you can tell your phone to “call mom” when she's in your contacts list under her real name. A few years ago we saw Google connect these two together, because it This Assistant data integrated into ContactsWhere are we now?
If we look at Google Contacts version 4.37.39, we have access to a number of screens related to the people you have designated as your 'Best Friends'. 9to5Google were able to enable a besties widget in Contacts about a month ago, which simply looked like a revamped version of the favorite contacts widgets. We can now have the app show a bestie reference on individual contact cards, and access a link to “Besties Onboarding.”
The problem is that the app just crashes now. But even if it fails, there’s still something to learn, and if we look at the crash dump, we find a reference to a mysterious com.google.android.apps.pixel.relationships package. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a reference to this in Contacts, and its presence here makes us wonder if Google is planning to introduce a new, overarching way to keep track of relationships in the near future.
Finally, a note, Google: “bestie” is superlative. You literally can’t have more than one best friend.