Tech giant Google recently made the decision to remove its YouTube Go platform which is most likely to stop working from August of this year. YouTube Go is an app optimised for low-end devices and the company is shutting it down as it considers it unnecessary. Now a new report informs that Google has removed its ‘Go’ branding from yet another app. The company’s Gallery Go app will no longer be available. This might indicate the changes coming to the lightweight versions of the first-party apps that are designed to run smoothly on low-end devices.
What Are Go Apps?
For those unaware, Google released the apps with Go branding for the smartphones and devices running on Android Go to make sure they are compatible with low-end hardware. Google originally introduced the Android Go OS back in 2017 along with Android version 8.0 Oreo. This version of the company’s operating software was launched for low-end devices. First-party apps such as Google Search, Assistant, YouTube, Maps, and Gmail were redesigned to be compatible with this version of the OS.
Talking about the Gallery Go app, the company launched it in 2019 as a lightweight variant of the company’s Photos app. The Gallery Go app is under 10MB in size and was created to be used only in offline mode. Using this app, users could automatically organise their library into various sub-sections such as people, selfies, nature, animals, documents, videos and movies. The app also featured very simple enhanced auto-editing.
However, as mentioned above, the Go branding has now been removed from the Gallery Go app as Google has updated the app with a new version 1.8.8.436428459. Gallery Go app has over 100 million users and is one of the few apps among Search, Maps and its Navigation component that is available on all the devices. This is not the first instance of Google bringing such as branding change. Back in 2018, the company changed the name of the “Files Go” app to “Files by Google” which marked the app being available to a wider audience.
