Files by Google is working on a built-in text file viewer

Android, as a platform, was never designed to be one-size-fits-all, and that’s a huge part of its appeal. Some users will go their whole lives never thinking twice about their phones’ file system, because they really don’t need to — but for those who do care about where all their data lives, and how it’s organized, we have tons of fantastic file manager apps. Those include Files by Google, and we’re starting off this week by checking out what looks like a new feature in the works for Google’s own solution.

A good developer really knows their user, and we are getting exactly those kind of synergistic vibes from this find. The sort of person who’s likely to be frequently using a file manager on Android may not be a developer themselves, but they’re probably the type of user who feels comfortable navigating the same circles. And that often means dealing with text file documentation.

Rather than the sort of rich text you’re used to from Google Docs or any other full-featured word processor with font size and style options, and all the formatting choices you could ever dream of, plain ASCII text files endure to this day, with their broad compatibility being a big reason why — pretty much every computer ever made will be able to make sense of them.

Looking at the changes in the 1.8436.793259964.0-release build of Files by Google, we’ve identified work on a basic viewer for text files.

While it’s not yet accessible, we were able to get an early look at the tool in action. Functionally, it’s quite limited, but we’re also not sure it really needs to be doing anything more to be useful.

Files will let you open text files and view them directly in the app. You can select text, and copy it to the clipboard… and that’s about it. There’s no search function, and certainly no text-entry or editing tools — this is for viewing text files, and maybe copying some lines out of them. This probably sounds like either nothing in the world to you, or a super-useful addition for quickly checking out stuff like README files. Like we said: The devs here absolutely know who they’re making this for.

It’s not like we couldn’t just open a text file in a dedicated editor app, or you could go with another file manager that already has a text viewer built-in, but we will be plenty happy to see Files by Google getting one, too.