Now Playing on Pixel may be getting its big missing feature back

Now Playing remains one of the most compelling reasons to buy a Pixel still. In March this year, Google brought a major update to Now Playing, advancing it with its own dedicated app. But the update also brought a few feature cutbacks and challenges, such as removing notifications about tracks being played in your surroundings. This broke popular use cases for using Now Playing’s notifications to import songs into apps, such as Last.fm.

What followed was dissatisfaction from users, which Google is now looking to address. It is working to add notifications for the currently playing track back to the app with a future update.

In the latest version of the Android System Intelligence app for Pixel 11 devices, we found cues signaling the return of Now Playing’s notification on Pixel phones. The app’s code now mentions the following string, which strongly suggests users would soon be able to toggle the app’s notifications:

The feature doesn’t seem to work at the moment, so we have to wait for a few more updates before we can share a working proof.

In addition to bringing back notifications, Google also appears to be working on adding support for multiple users. This would tie into the different user accounts on a Pixel, where each user account will have its own history for the tracks detected by the phone. This is indicated by another string that we spotted in code:

Currently, if you have multiple users set up on your Pixel, only the admin can use Now Playing. But once the update is implemented, we expect it to be available to all user accounts on the phone.

As with the notification, we don’t have a clear timeline for when this could be implemented. It’s not working at the moment, but we hope Google doesn’t take too long to move in this direction.