With the release of Android 12 Beta 4 yesterday, Google’s new generation of mobile operating systems has finally reached the milestone of platform stability. Soon, Google is expected to officially announce the arrival of Android 12 at the fall Pixel 6 series hardware new product launch conference. Although the latest beta version did not bring any noteworthy new features or UI changes, it did give us a taste of the fast global search experience for the first time.
As early as the Android 12 Beta 2 stage, we have noticed some improvements in the Pixel Launcher (launcher). Now, the new search experience is finally available in Android 12 Beta 4-although root access is required beforehand. As shown in the figure, the new search bar replaces the search widget driven by the Google App in the current Pixel launcher. However, the Google App search bar on the home screen remained firmly there.
Users can quickly find applications, shortcuts, widgets, settings, contacts, conversations, and tips through the new search bar. Users can also choose what search results to pop up, or set whether they want to automatically open the virtual keyboard when the search bar is displayed. As a comparison, the old search bar will only open the Google App, causing many people to complain that the experience is stuck and slow.
The new version of the search bar also allows you to jump directly from the App Drawer to a specific part of the app. For example, when searching for the camera application, there are options such as video recording, Selfie, and jump to albums. In addition, the new search bar in Pixel Launcher also utilizes the AppSearch API introduced in Android 12 Beta 3. As a completely offline device-side search library, developers can integrate it into their own applications on-demand to bring a rich full-text search experience.
Finally, a new service called AiAiSearchUiService has been added to the Android system smart application, and XDA-Developers also managed to enable this new search function in the Pixel launcher. This service is set as the system default search UI service on Pixel phones and is defined by the config_defaultSearchUiService framework configuration value, but it is not available in the earlier Android 12 preview version.
