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From Google Tulip to spoon bending in Gboard: here are Google’s April Fool’s Day gags

Google Japan brought spoon bending to Gboard. Google Japan

Google is well-known for joining in on the April Fool’s Day fun, with past gags including Google Maps for NES, Google Voice for Pets, and toilet-based internet connectivity.

The company has made at least four announcements today to mark the occasion, and there’s no mistaking most of them for the real deal. We take a look at all of these ridiculous reveals.

Snake in Google Maps

The splash screen in Google Maps Snake. Levels in Google Maps Snake. Google Maps Snake gameplay.

The first announcement is actually the only legitimate one on the list, as Google is allowing Maps users to play Snake on the service. To get started, you need to hit the hamburger menu button in the top-left, then choose Play Snake. From here, you’ll be able to play Snake in a variety of locales, namely Cairo, London, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Sydney and Tokyo.

Google says Snake will be available in the Android and iOS app for roughly a week. If you’re like me and haven’t received the game just yet, then you can visit the Google Maps Snake website instead.

A screen cleaner in the Files app

The Files app was a long-overdue official file manager for Android devices, bringing other cool features too. Now, Google’s latest “feature” is a screen cleaner, which promises to literally clean your phone display.

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Google says the feature works by using “geometric dirt models, combined with haptic micromovement pulses, to dislodge what’s stuck to your screen.” The company says that a thin magnetic field is then generated by the app to further protect the screen, complete with a “sweet scent.”

Obviously this is meant to be an April Fool’s joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a few people fall for it. After all, there are loads of apps on the Play Store that claim to bring fingerprint sensing to phones without a scanner…

Google Tulip

Ever wanted to speak to flowers? Well, the Mountain View company is offering just this with Google Tulip.

“Thanks to great advancements in artificial intelligence, Google Home is now able to understand tulips, allowing translation between Tulipish and dozens of human languages,” the company noted in a blog post.

The firm claims that tulips can now tell humans when they need more light, space, and water. Furthermore, the flowers are supposedly great listeners and give excellent advice in return.

Google says the feature is only available on April 1, and can be activated on your Google Home device by simply saying “hey Google, talk to my tulip.”

Spoon bending for Gboard

Is it the strangest gag on the list? I’m not sure, but Google Japan’s April Fool’s joke (h/t: 9to5Google) is certainly a weird entry. The company claims you can now bend a special, smart spoon to type Japanese characters in Gboard.

According to Google’s Japanese unit, the spoon is equipped with either micro-USB or Bluetooth 4.1, and has been bent 2019401 times (get it?). The division has created a Github project for the gag too, but warns that this isn’t an officially supported product.

That’s it for Google’s April Fool’s Day gags thus far, but what was your favorite announcement? Let us know in the comments!

NEXT: Is the Huawei P30 Pro camera worth the hype? See for yourself



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