With Hangouts nearing the end of its life, Google is working on expanding its support for its Chat and Spaces platforms. Now, the company has even rolled out an update for Gmail for Android, which brings new status bar icons that helps users differentiate from Chat and Spaces.

For those unaware, new message alerts for either Google Chat (basically a chat app like WhatsApp) and Spaces (Slack-like platform) were the same. Notifications on the status bar featured a filled in message bubble with another one behind it. But now, the Search Engine giant is working on making the two platforms more distinct from one another thanks to a revamp in status bar icons (Via 9To5Google).

Now, the Chat app will have a single message bubble that is outlined and has an empty interior. On the other hand, Spaces will now have three people standing next to each other. In other words, the company is also using the bottom bar tab icons for the status bar as well. This also matches the Gmail icon for email and even adds a quality of life improvement that helps people, like professional enterprise users to quickly figure out which platform the message belongs to.

As of right now, the new status bar icons has only been seen on a singly Android device, which runs the version 2022.02.20.x of Gmail. This build has not been widely released at the moment. Although, we can expect to see the change arrive in more smartphones in the near future. Notably, the change also arrives as Gmail for iOS begins showing the Chat sender’s profile photo starting from this month.

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