Google Lens is one of many free and useful tools provided by Google. The standalone application of this service was released on the Play Store in June 2018. Two and a half years later, the number of installations of this application in the official Android application store has exceeded 500 million.
For those who aren’t aware of it, Google Lens is an image recognition tool that was first unveiled at Google I / O 2017.
That same year, the search giant integrated this service with the Google Assistant on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. It then became available on Google Photos for both Pixels and other Android devices a few months later in 2018.
Around the same time, Google’s OEM partners began integrating the Google Lens with the camera app on their smartphones.
Only after that, Google Lens made its debut as a standalone app on the Google Play Store. Despite being a standalone app, it depends on the Google app, as does Google Assistant and Google Podcasts.
In addition to scanning texts and translating them, Google Lens also allows you to copy scanned text to your computer, search for a specific object, solve math and science questions, recognize handwritten notes, and more.
That said, it’s interesting that although Google Lens can be used on all Android phones that support Google Assistant, users have been downloading standalone apps from the Google Play store since the first launch. As a result, it reached 500 million downloads in a short period of time.
