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With a major new version comes a whole new lineup of new Google Apps, sadly, these weren’t included in the new Developer Previews that were released for both the Nexus 5 and the Nexus 7 (2013). This is probably due to the fact that the latest wave of Developer Previews still aren’t 100% final and are very much the previews that they’re called. However, it appears that a system dump from the Nexus 6 has been doing the rounds and within this new build of Android 5.0 Lollipop is hiding some key Google Apps that have all gotten quite the update. Chief among them being the completely new Messenger app and one of our first looks at Google Fit on a smartphone.
We’e covered a number of these apps individually across Android Headlines, so feel free to have a root around and learn more about these apps. For a quick refresher though, these apps will only run on Android 5.0 Lollipop as of right now (although some have reported that these work on Android 4.4 KitKat as well). Messenger is basically a replacement for the aging SMS app that’s been included in Android since the year dot and it’s basically a fresh Material app for those that don’t have access to Hangouts or just don’t want to use it. A smart move from Google here, this will please those in emerging markets or those that wants to keep SMS and Hangouts separate. Moving on, the Google Fit app is pretty barebones right now and isn’t aimed at the hardcore fitness fan, instead it’s a pretty casual app, but we assume more will come of this with Android Wear 2.0 and as other partners can hook into Google Fit.
We already covered the Google Play Music app getting its Material Makeover, and while it isn’t what we saw from Google I/O earlier in the year it’s still a fresh take on Play Music. In this ZIP we’ve put together APK files for the new Messenger app, the new Calendar, Google Play Music, Play Books, Drive, Google Fit, Keep and GMail. All you need do is to extract the ZIP file and install them on your Nexus 5 running Lollipop. For those more adventurous, you could try placing the APK files in your /system/lib folder but of course this will require root access and might not even work.