The new revamped Gboard toolbar has been in the works since last summer, but is now apparently starting to roll out to some beta channel users. The changes are quite radical and the shortcuts in the toolbar are now positioned more coherently with respect to the available space, the shape of the buttons also changes which from circular becomes rectangular, but with visibly rounded corners.
All this definitely benefits the available space and now up to six shortcuts will be displayed as the circular button on the far left has been replaced by a 2×2 grid icon that shows or hides the entire Shortcuts panel rather than just the strip. In parallel the ellipses/overflows have been removed, thus freeing up some useful space, also you can now place any shortcut in the microphone slot.
It also becomes easier to customize Gboard shortcuts, as you can use drag & drop to move items to the desired position. They are also introduced two new shortcuts: Emoji and Language Switcher.
Visually, the new buttons aren’t the fanciest and look boxy compared to the previous background icon approach, but it’s the customization options that are the most significant part of the Gboard toolbar update. At the moment the changes have only appeared on some of our Android devices updated to the latest beta version of Gboard, therefore the release could take place in stages in the next few hours.
