[Video] Here’s what Google Keep’s Version History feature looks like in action

We recently highlighted the upcoming “Version History” feature for Google Keep after I discovered it was a thing. It’s currently rolling out, and will allow you to view previous versions of your text notes (not images though). To access the version history of a note, you just need to visit Keep on the web, hover over a note, click it, and then choose ‘Version history’ from the three-dot ‘more’ options menu.

Now, thanks to a video posted by @AssembleDebug on X (Heads up, language warning), we finally have a sneak peek of what the feature looks like in action. In the video, it can be seen that tapping ‘Version History’ pops up a dialogue box displaying several previous versions of the note, each labeled with a date and time stamp accompanied by a ‘Download’ button. Unfortunately, this is where the feature falls into the pit of pointlessness in my opinion.

Google Keep's Version History. I have seen news of this, but with "Coming soon" written. Luckily Google enabled it for me and here is how it works. #Google #Android https://t.co/MGeCDVz3iM pic.twitter.com/QG12cIlAV5

— AssembleDebug (@AssembleDebug) August 18, 2023

To view the contents of a note in the version history, you still have to download the note itself, which is far from ideal. There’s literally no ‘restore’ option to place it directly back into the service, overwriting the current copy, so you must go and open that downloaded note as a text file, copy the text from inside of it, and paste it back into the web interface…yeesh.

What on Earth was Google thinking with this design decision? Here’s to hoping this isn’t the final form of the feature, and that it will receive better and more intuitive implementation after launch. Why even launch it in this state to begin with? Anyway, let me know in the comments how you feel about this as it is , and if you, like me, think something is off here.