Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL; DR
- It looks like Google is developing Photos to support the ability to search your photos from the Pixel launcher.
- Evidence in both Google Photos and the latest Android 17 Beta hints at a new framework for integrating the Pixel launcher into the search bar.
- While Photos may be first, other apps can search for their content through the Pixel launcher.
Your phone main screen is undoubtedly the most important part of its interface — we keep coming back to it when we launch new tasks and smartly configured layouts with our best apps and several apps. useful widgets can go a long way in helping you get the most out of your phone. For Pixel users, this includes Google’s always-on search bar at the bottom of their screen, quickly linking them to apps or offering shortcuts to search the web. But as it already is, the Pixel launcher search could be more powerful.
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We’ve seen Google’s experiences searches for images such as screenshots ago, but we could be about to get a more powerful image search experience thanks to some new integration with Google Photos. A few new lines of text catch our eye when looking at the software’s latest version 7.74.0.906046556 update:
Code
Access to Google Photos
The %1$s can access your photos so you can search them from the Pixel launcher. Learn more That second line really gets to the point: We’re looking for a way to search your Google Photos library right from the Pixel launcher.
That in itself would certainly be pretty interesting – the reference to a “search api” certainly suggests that Photos plans to offer a rich search experience through the launcher. But this is the first crumb on the road we are on today.
Here’s our next snippet: Google Photos also refers to an app with a package name com.google.android.apps.pixel.launcherconnectorone we haven’t seen before. Before we start debating theories about what Google might do with it, we have a few more lines that make up our final scraps:
Code
Apps in search results
Manage which apps show results in search We found these in Google’s Android 17 Beta on the Pixel launcher. And looking at it all together, we begin to see what shape it all takes.
Google is developing a new framework to allow the Pixel launcher’s search bar to interface with Android apps and search content within them. Although it started with Google Photos, some of these lines seem generic enough to make us think Google intends to leave the door open for additional apps — perhaps Google will eventually integrate it into your Workspace apps so you can access your Docs or Drive from the same place.
Google has been pretty aggressive with its Pixel launcher search changes lately, so we might get a chance to see this in action soon. For now, it’s all a bit speculative, and while we’re optimistic about the potential of this tool, we might want to wait and see how Google eventually delivers it before we get too excited.
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