Joe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Calling Cards offer a great way to customize how incoming calls appear on your own phone.
- So far, though, the system has lacked a way for you to choose how your Calling Card will appear remotely.
- A new “My calling card” screen could finally give you that opportunity.
Apple’s got its Contact Posters on iOS, and earlier this year we saw Calling Cards arrive for Android, letting users customize what they see when their friends and family call. Google’s already been working to add new options there, like letting you fine-tune the fonts, but this whole time there’s been a fundamental problem with how Calling Cards work — and now it looks like Google might actually get around to resolving it.
For as great as Calling Cards are, anyone who’s familiar with Contact Posters on iOS will be quick to point out Google’s major limitation: While you can give all your contacts their own custom looks, there’s no way for that to work the other way around, and let you define how your own Calling Card should appear on remote devices.
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At least, that’s how Google’s implementation has worked so far, but looking through version 197.0.821392025-publicbeta-pixel of the Phone by Google app, we’ve uncovered a new option that sure seems to address this oversight.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
That new “My calling card” setting describes itself in such a way as to sound exactly like what we’ve been looking for: a way to choose how we’ll appear remotely. Right now, tapping that “Create” button doesn’t yet do anything useful, but we can imagine it taking us to a screen very similar to the one we already use for setting up Calling Cards for our contacts.
Of course, we’ve still got plenty of questions about how all this might work — what will users see if they’ve already set a Calling Card for us on their own phone, but now we’ve also used this “My calling card” tool? Ideally we’d be given the option to choose, or maybe Google will let us set a default behavior.
But even with those uncertainties hanging over us, this feels like big progress in the right direction, and we’re all the more excited about Calling Cards now that we know that Google’s not ignoring this problem. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring you a slightly more functional look at this new setting in action soon.
⚠️ 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.
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