A long-awaited feature is finally rolling out to the Google Contacts app, months after it was discovered.
Once you’ve installed the latest update, you’ll now be able to see your recent call history within a contact card in Google Contacts.
Linking together Google’s core apps
First spotted in late April of this year, this latest addition to the Google Contacts app is a direct integration between the Contacts app and your calling and messaging apps. It adds a small “Recent Activity” section to your contact cards, which displays the details of your last call with that contact, as well as a brief snippet of your last text message with them as well. Tapping on either of the extracts will open up the app the information was g;eaned from, making it a neat shortcut as well. It’s a small evolution of the single contact widgets Google rolled out a few months ago, and a useful way to bring together information from across Google’s apps.
As you might suspect, this sort of cross-referencing between apps requires handing over permissions to the app in question, so you’ll need to set it up in your Google Contacts’ Organize tab. Plus, you’ll also need the very latest version of Google Contacts, and while the rollout is confirmed to have begun, it might not have reached your area or device quite yet.
It’s an extremely useful addition, bringing together information from a number of different apps into one combined area. If you, like me, only really use the Contacts app to add new phone numbers, it might be worth a little dig into everything the app now has to offer. Google has been pumping a lot into this app in the last year, adding a VIP status for specific contacts, emojis and memojis for contact photos, and general improvements that greatly improves syncing your contacts with Google’s services. Google is doing a great job at turning Contacts into an all-in-one app for, well, contacting people. You might not actually use it to message people, but you can start here to fire off messages on WhatsApp or other messaging services, remind yourself of a birthday, or just remember to catch up.
There’s an admirable quality in Google trying to give the Contacts app value. After all, if I want to phone someone I’ll usually use the dialer app, and if I want to message them, I’ll use whichever messaging app I speak to them on. Contacts has been a lame duck for a while now, and honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I used it. However, these changes are making me far more interested in an app I otherwise would not have given a second thought.
