Google Discover may finally stop hiding the links it shares (APK teardown)
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR Earlier this year, Google implemented automatic link shortening for stories shared through Discover.
If you'd rather keep the full URL intact, it looks like Google is developing an option to disable the shorteners.
Right now we're able to activate an early preview of the toggle, but it's not yet operational.
Google is absolutely no stranger when it comes to controversies, but they don't have to all be big 'federal antitrust case' scale for us to take notice of them. Sometimes it's the smallest moves that end up generating a little pushback, and earlier this year we raised an eyebrow to a questionable change Discover was implementing, replacing full URLs with shortened URLs for sharing. If you didn't love the idea of Google tracking those links, or people just not being able to easily tell what they were clicking, we might have some good news for you.
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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.
Google recently released version 16.23.69.ve.arm64 beta of its Android app, and as were poking around looking for any interesting changes we stumbled across a new option for Discover link sharing. By default, Discover automatically shortens the URLs of news items you go to share with the help of Google's search.app and share.google tools.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Right now this toggle is neither visible nor operational, and while we weren't able to get it working just yet, we have been able to coax the app to show us the setting as it may appear. Even without getting to see it in action, the label makes it pretty clear what we're dealing with here, and the toggle should ultimately give users the choice between sharing stories with their complete, original URL, or running the link through one of Google's shorteners first.
Really, this option feels like how the shorteners should have been initially introduced, as a deliberately optional tool, but we'll be satisfied enough to see it belatedly arrive — assuming that actually happens. In the meantime we'll keep an eye on future Google app updates and see if we aren't able to get this actually working a little ahead of schedule.
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