Affordable cloud storage optionshave played a major role in keeping us content even when some of thebest Android phonesdecided to stop offering models with expandable storage. Google offers Drive as your one-stop cloud storage solution bundled with your Gmail account, and everything you create using Workspace utilities like Docs, Sheets, and Slides is saved to Drive by default. Sifting through saved files later can be a pain, but the Drive app for Android could soon make it a pleasant experience.
How to use Google Drive: A guide to making your storage helpful
Make the most out of Google Drive
Google Drivealready has an in-app search feature on its Android app, where you may enter the filename and scroll through the short list of results to find what you’re looking for. You can narrow down your search even further using filters for recency, document type, and folders, all of which show up as chips when you tap the app’s search bar. However, it’s a long list of filters which scroll horizontally, and you may end up wasting a few seconds choosing the suitable filter.
The current state of search in Google Drive’s Android app
All the space below these chips is dedicated to another horizontally scrolling list of contacts you may have collaborated with. In our experience, the suggestions are about as accurate as the quick messaging shortcuts in the Android share sheet. For some unknown reason, Google makes the Drive user experience even worse, allowing you to only select one filter at a time — meaning you can only look up spreadsheets or all your files from the last seven days, but you cannot combine the filters to find spreadsheets you made in the past week.
Upcoming changes to Drive’s search UI
After checking out the flags which control hidden in-app features,@AssembleDebug on Xconfirms that a revised UI design is in the works for the search experience on Drive (viaTheSpAndroid). Google plans top replace the chips and contact suggestions with three drop-down filters — file type, participating people, and the date modified.
Tapping any of these three drop-downs opens a card from the bottom of the screen. You can pick from the same file types available previously, such as Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Folders, Sites, Archive, and Shortcuts. When filtering by date modified, Drive gives the option to find documents edited today, in the last seven days, 30 days, this year, or last year. You can enter a custom date range as well. Pulling up the option to sort by participating people brings up another dedicated search bar where you can look up contacts who collaborated on what you’re looking for.
These advanced search filters greatly simplify the search experience in the Drive app on Android, but unfortunately, they are unavailable to the public right now, hidden behind flags. Thankfully, the implementation looks complete and functional, and ready for a widespread rollout, so we hope to see an official announcement from Google soon.
