Google Drive for Android gets Material Design update, improvements to search, sharing, and the PDF viewer

Google today updated Google Drive for Android with a new design and features related to search, sharing, and PDFs. You can download the new version now directly from Google Play.

First up, the search tool has been revamped so that it updates results as you type. Given that Google is a still primarily a search company, this probably didn’t take too much effort to cobble together:

Above you can also see the new Material Design that Google is rolling out across all its apps and services. Notice that each file and folder is shown as a “card” – a design paradigm the company has been pushing ever since it launched Google Now.

Next, the app’s sharing component now lets you add a custom message when you send a file, letting recipients know why you’re sending it. You can also now turn on link sharing on files to make them public (you can still choose viewing, commenting, and editing access rights), which automatically copies the link to the clipboard for pasting wherever you want.

Last but not least, the PDF viewer has received a significant retooling: You can now find, select, and copy text in PDFs. Best of all, it’s now built directly into Google Drive, so you don’t need to launch it separately:

Google Drive may have started as a file storage and synchronization service, but ever since it gained collaborative editing, it has been ballooning in features. In fact, Google chose to release separate Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps, which Drive launches when you want to edit a file.

It’s worth noting that those apps are also getting improvements “over the coming days,” including an Incoming tab in each app (for quickly getting to any file that was shared with you), being able to use an existing document as a template, and more. Details for those are available here.