Google’s smart storage app - Files Go - accidentally leaks

Google has been working quietly on an in-house file manager. Development of such an app has not been known to the public, until today, that is.

A new app called “Files Go” has accidentally been posted to the Google Play Store long enough for someone to re-upload it to a file-sharing website. As of right now, the direct Play Store link doesn’t lead anywhere, only offering a “Not found” page.

We installed the app from the mirror link and poked around. There are a few useful features that appear to be aimed at giving you more information and control over what is taking up precious space on your smartphone.

Aside from seeing how much space you have left on your device, the main “Storage” tab offers a card based interface. These cards suggest where you might want to clear some data to make more space. The ones we saw were “App cache”, “Large files”, “Downloaded files”, “Duplicate files”, and “Junk media”.

Storage Tab

Under the “Files tab” is a list of file categories like Downloads, Images, Videos, and Documents. Tap on a category to look at a particular type of file and where they reside in your storage. Also in the Files tab is a Transfer tool, one that would make sharing large amounts of files easy. If you wanted to send a file or batch of files, you’d hit “Send files” and the app will turn on Bluetooth and fire up the phone’s hotspot for your friend to connect by tapping “Receive” in the same app.

Files tab

A few other worthy features are alerts when storage is low, and alerts when apps haven’t been used for longer than 30 days.

Settings

In its current state, the app is not ready. It briefly freezes when pulling down to refresh, and there doesn’t appear to be any proper file management actions like unzipping, or copy/pasting. The idea of such an app that does all basic file managing in addition to smart suggestions and file transferring would be an excellent addition to Google’s repertoire of in-house applications.

It’s worth mentioning that just because we saw this app leak, doesn’t necessarily mean that Google will release such an app, though it definitely does raise the chance considerably, doesn’t it?

Thanks for the tip!

Play Store link (broken) | Via (translated) | link to mirrored APK