Google Photos could soon get a surprising third-party integration (APK teardown)
TL;DR Google Photos is testing a CapCut button to help users edit Memories in the ByteDance-owned app.
We spotted and were able to surface the button while conducting an APK teardown of the Google Photos Android app.
The button only appears for Memories made up of photos and does not show up for a video-only memory.
In a rather surprising move, Google seems to be quietly testing a new third-party integration in its Photos app, the likes of which we've never seen before. It's extremely rare for Google to promote a third-party app within its own app, especially one owned by a company under scrutiny in several regions, including the US, but that's exactly what may be happening.
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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.
While digging through the code of version 7.38 of the Google Photos app, we spotted and managed to surface a new 'Edit in CapCut' button directly linked to the popular video editing tool owned by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
The new 'Edit in CapCut' button appears within the Memories viewer of Google Photos, a feature that auto-generates highlight reels of your past photos and videos. The screenshots below show the new, full-screen Memories UI in Google Photos, a change we first observed back in February. But now, for memories made up of photos, the 'Edit in CapCut' option shows up prominently in the bottom left corner of the screen.
If the memory is a video spotlight (a video-only memory), the CapCut option doesn't appear. For users who don't have CapCut installed, tapping the button triggers a Play Store prompt to install the app. If you have CapCut already on your device, the selected memory will likely be downloaded and sent directly to the CapCut editor for further customization. We couldn't get CapCut to open up after pressing the button since the app isn't available in India, where our contributor Assemble Debug discovered the integration.
This makes us wonder why Google would promote a non-Google, ByteDance-owned app in Photos? CapCut is banned in countries like India, meaning this feature will likely be inaccessible or broken for users in the region. The app was also temporarily suspended in the United States, but came back online earlier this year. Perhaps ByteDance has offered incentives to Google to push CapCut through one of its most widely used apps.
Given that the feature hasn't rolled out widely or even appeared in the app's beta version, it's possible that Google is just testing the waters or planning a limited regional launch.
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