Hangouts for Android adds ‘/shruggie’ command, hints at future enhanced notification controls

In a fairly minor update, Google has jumped Hangouts up to version 12.0. Within this update there’s nothing too new, but we do get one fairly long-awaited feature, the “/shruggie” command which was added to the desktop version a while back.

Just like on the desktop, this feature inserts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whenever a user types and sends “/shruggie” in chat. Along with that, other “/” commands such as “/ponies” and “/pitchforks” also seem to be working in this update. As minor as this is, it finally rounds out the mobile Hangouts experience and matches it with that of the desktop clients.

Through an APK Teardown, Android Police was able to reveal one of the features Google seems to be implementing: enhanced notification filtering. A string of code within the Hangouts app shows that Google is adding three new notification filters, “All Notifications”, “Important Only”, and “None”. Senders will be able to mark notifications as important, and this prompt will only appear if a user sends a message to a user who has the “Important Only” filter enabled.

As the release of Allo comes, we know that Google is planning to shift the focus of Hangouts to the business user, so these new notification options are possibly aimed at those users. Hangouts v12 is currently rolling out on Google Play.