Google Play Services for AR (formerly known as ARCore) is the company's platform for augmented reality experiences. There are a lot of fun things you can do with AR, but one of the most practical uses is seeing objects in your physical space. Google Shopping may be preparing such a feature along with a dark mode and Google Lens shortcut.

An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by Google in a future build.

In Google Shopping v52 for Android, we spotted new two assets that suggest support for previewing items in an AR view. The first asset is named "quantum_ic_view_in_ar_new_white" and it depicts a 3D cube inside a Google Lens-like box. The second asset is named "view_in_3d_background."

We think that the idea here is you can view products, such as furniture, in your physical space before purchasing. This gives users a better idea of the scale of an object. When we discovered the AR Shopping features last year, they were part of the Playground app for Google Pixel phones. Since the newly found assets are from the Google Shopping app, the feature would be available to more people.

Next up is evidence that the Google Shopping app will be getting a dark mode. Google recently added a colors.xml resource file under values-night. The resources defined in "values-night" are used when Android's system-wide dark mode is enabled. The color resource folder also includes files for the primary text color for dark mode and light mode.

Lastly, we activated a hidden setting that puts a Google Lens shortcut in the Google Shopping search bar. As you would expect, tapping this opens the "Search" mode in Google Lens. This may have been present in the app for a while, but it's still not live.

As mentioned, the AR-related assets seem to be new in Google Shopping v52, but the dark mode files and Google Lens icon have been around prior. Hopefully, we will see these things go live soon.