Google’s mobile Gmail app is going to start showing ads

Among other smaller additions, Android Police found a pretty big change coming to Google’s Gmail 4.6 App this week: Ads.

While El Goog hasn’t officially activated ads on mobile yet, the App is getting ready for them with a bunch of new code tailored around bringing ads to Gmail. Snippets are pasted below

<string name=”ad”>AD</string>
<string name=”ad_will_not_save”>Will not save ad as message</string>
<string name=”ad_will_save”>Will save ad as message</string>
<string name=”ad_dismissed”>Ad dismissed</string>

The above appears to suggest that you’ll be able to save ads as messages. Like an ad? Save it, and it’ll become part of your inbox. Don’t like it, and it’ll get dismissed. Very interesting, isn’t it?

To support ads, a whole brand new library was added called… ads:

com/google/android/gm/ads/

Inside, we have 8 classes, all related to ad presentation – toasts, teaser, sender header, ad header, ad border, and the ad view itself:

The likely move isn’t at all surprising and with Google popping ads disguised as email in Gmail tabbed interface and well, that’s how Google makes money.  You didn’t think Gmail was really free, did you?