Chromebook Diagnostic app is getting a touchscreen test tool

Since its inception, the Diagnostics app has slowly gained features along the way, making it a more-useful tool with each incarnation. At the moment, in the Stable Channel of ChromeOS, you can easily see the internal code name of your device, the current build, the size of your battery, its health, the CPU model, cores and speeds and a bit about your RAM. In addition, you can run some quick tests to see how your battery, CPU and RAM are all performing as well.

It’s a powerful tool that only gets better over time, and our latest find shows an important test suite should be on the way soon for a Chromebook near you. We’ve come across a few commits from the Chromium Repositories that show work being done to bring touchscreen testing tools to the ChromeOS Diagnostics app in the near future.

From the looks of these commits, it is clear that Google is ready to add some testing tools for users looking to diagnose problems with touch input. With so many manufacturers and so many different screen hardware options out there, this will should make troubleshooting your device a bit easier once it does arrive.

Interestingly enough, upon digging a bit deeper into the files, we found that a similar feature should be on the way for touchpads as well, and I think that could be just as worthwhile and beneficial for most Chromebook users as touchpads can be just as finicky as touchscreens.

It also looks like this will be an interactive tool as the instructions for using it require the user to swipe up to five fingers across the screen at once. Generally, screen testers need multi-finger input to diagnose what the issue is; whether it is lag, failed inputs, or problems with multi-touch. It looks like the new test in the ChromeOS Diagnostics app will do just that.

We attempted to find all of this working in the latest build of ChromeOS Canary, but so far we’re not seeing any changes. There were a couple flags present, but they didn’t trigger anything right away. We’ll be keeping an eye on this and hope to see it and the handful of other new features in the ChromeOS Diagnostics app show up sooner than later. Stay tuned.