Google Pixel phones could soon get a dedicated app for one of their oldest features

• Evidence of a Now Playing app has been found in Android code
• This would mean the Pixel's Now Playing feature would be moved to a dedicated app
• That's likely to lead to upgrades for this somewhat neglected tool

Now Playing is a feature that’s been present on Pixel phones since the Google Pixel 2 series, but while it’s been a built-in feature all this time, it seems that Google is planning to give it a dedicated app instead.

This is according to 9to5Google, which has found a code string in a new version of Android System Intelligence that mentions a Now Playing app you can “upgrade” to by downloading it from the Google Play Store.

On top of that, an icon for the Now Playing app – which you can see below – had previously been dug up.

So while this change hasn’t been officially confirmed by Google yet, it looks very likely that it’s coming.

Right now, the Now Playing feature will work in the background on your Pixel phone to identify songs that it hears playing, and then you can find those identified songs in the Now Playing section of your phone’s settings menu. It’s a useful, unintrusive feature, but it has some limitations and issues.

For one thing, having to dig several menus deep into settings to find a list of identified songs isn’t ideal, and for another, your Now Playing history isn’t synced to a new device when you change phones.

A likely upgrade – but only for Pixels

Having a dedicated app could potentially fix both of those problems, and might make it easier for Google to introduce or improve other features too. Again, none of that is confirmed, but we can’t see why Google would turn Now Playing into a dedicated app if it didn’t plan to upgrade the feature. So hopefully this will be a good change.

As for when we’ll see this app, 9to5Google speculates that it might land as part of the next Pixel Feature Drop in March.

However, if you were hoping this move to an installable app meant that Now Playing would be available on devices other than just Pixels, you're probably out of luck, as Android Authority has done some of its own digging and found signs that at least for now it will remain a Pixel-exclusive feature.

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