We’ve seen designs for radial menus in Android before but they’ve never looked this cool or this detailed. Patent Bolt has spotted a recently published Google patent that shows how Google might take its previous radial menu designs to another level by adding sub-menus that branch out from the basic radial menu options.
As you can see in the picture above, Google has designed a system that lets you use your thumb as an anchor and then lets you use your index finger to open up the sub-menu options. In this way Google seems to have added a lot more different options into the radial menu than in the Android menu we saw back in 2012 that only imagined a semicircle with four different options.
As is the case with a lot of patents filed, however, there’s no guarantee that Google will actually add this menu to the next or any future Android release. Nonetheless, it’s something we’d certainly love to see if Google can make it work well on Android devices.
