8 Things Google Needs To Change On Its Pixel Launcher

Google’s Pixel Launcher is fantastic. It’s short on customization features, but it has plenty of useful tools to help you get the most out of your Pixel phone. While other Android launchers offer more, the Pixel launcher focuses on quality, not quantity.

However, it’s not perfect. Google forces us to use features like At a Glance, and innovations made by Samsung to its Android skin are unmatched by Google. We want Google to maintain the simple design of the Pixel Launcher, but it needs these upgrades if it wants to maintain its status as one of the best Android launchers available.

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It’s not a useful tool for everyone

The At a Glance tool is at the core of the Pixel Launcher’s home screen experience. Most of the time, it displays the current date and weather in the top left of your Pixel Launcher’s home screen. However, this tool can show severe weather alerts, upcoming calendar events, the progress of deliveries, estimated commute times, fitness reports, and more. It’s a useful tool, but you’re forced to use it.

At a Glance takes up valuable space on the most important area of your phone’s home screen. Not only can’t you disable the feature, but you can’t move it around like a regular widget. Adding widget functionality to let us move and resize At a Glance would be a massive upgrade for the Pixel Launcher.

We don’t need it on every home screen page

The customizable Google Search widget on a Samsung phone

The At a Glance tool can feel inconvenient, but the mandatory Google Search takes up even more space. While At a Glance only appears on one page on your home screen, the Google Search widget is present on every page.

Even though it’s useful having Google Search and Lens at your fingertips at all times, the rigid placement is frustrating. Allowing us to move, resize, or disable Google Search will drastically improve the experience for Pixel users. While we don’t expect that Google will allow us to disable the Google search tool (this is a Google product, after all), we hope for the ability to move and resize the widget to some extent.

6 Large folders for the home screen

A simple way to help us organize our apps

One of the simplest but most useful features of Oxygen OS is its Enlarge folder option. This option expands a one-tile folder to occupy four tiles, then it shrinks the apps inside to fit in a 3×3 grid. From here, you can open any app directly, there’s no need to open the folder.

This basic feature would be a significant improvement to the Pixel Launcher. While we love the stripped-down design of the launcher, customization options like bigger folders would improve the organization of our Pixel phone’s home screen.

5 Customizable gestures

Let us do more with what we have

The Pixel Launcher has a measly list of eight gesture actions. This is a poor showing compared to third-party launchers, which allow more gestures with greater functionality. Eight would be a reasonable number of recognized gestures if Google allowed us to customize them further.

Allowing us to link more gestures to apps would be a significant upgrade for the Pixel launcher. Currently, you can only link the Quick Tap action to open apps. Expanding this feature across all the Pixel Launcher’s supported gestures (plus allowing additional gestures like a two-finger swipe or double-tap) would give us the customization we expect from an Android phone.

4 A better tutorial for Pixel-exclusive features

We can’t use features if we don’t know they exist

Source: Google

Google crams its Pixel phones with a huge amount of useful features, but they’re easy to miss. While starting up a Pixel phone for the first time will prompt you to explore the unique features of your phone, you might just skip this and never come back.

You can come back to this introduction later through the Pixel Tips app, but again, it requires intentional action from the user. Instead, we want Google to scatter a few reminders of its most powerful tools throughout the Pixel Launcher. A detailed breakdown of all the features of Phone by Google upon opening the app, a quick demo of the Recorder app, and examples of Live Caption in action are all steps Google could take to connect users to powerful features they would use.

On top of this, Google could do more to make its exclusive features more visible. Many of these features are buried in the Settings app; you won’t find Now Playing unless you’re already looking for it.

3 More always-on display features

The Pixel Launcher’s AOD is basic at best

The always-on display (AOD) on Pixel phones is a limited experience. It will show you the time, date, weather, and any app icons with pending notifications. You can turn AOD on or off, but that’s it.

Samsung’s Galaxy phones offer greater control over your AOD. You can change the clock style, show more information, change the theme, and more. While we don’t want the Pixel Launcher to adopt some of the more unnecessary customization features of One UI, it’s clear that the AOD, as it stand,s is rudimentary at best. This omission is highlighted by the Pixel 9 Pro’s LPTO display, which could support AOD wallpapers that show an image at 1Hz, which would barely affect your phone’s battery life.

2 Improved app drawer customization

Alphabet buttons are sorely needed

While the Pixel Launcher’s home screen has enough customization options to allow every user to personalize it, the app drawer has none. You can only sort apps alphabetically, and there’s no way to set what frequently used apps appear at the top.

A simple upgrade like the alphabet buttons on other app drawers (allowing you to tap a letter to navigate to that section of the app drawer) would keep with the Pixel Launcher’s minimalistic aesthetic while improving its usability. While the suggested apps at the top of the app drawer are reasonably useful, the ability to customize this further by pinning apps would be useful. And what about folders in the app drawer?

One UI 7’s recent app menu is the best implementation of this feature we’ve seen on any Android phone. Unlike other elements of One UI, it balances utility and features perfectly. It shows recently used apps at the bottom, a Close all button above, and then app preview windows.

Google could take a leaf out of Samsung’s book and copy the recently used apps feature from the app drawer into the recent app menu. One UI 7’s improved scrolling animation is also worth copying, as it feels smoother and looks cleaner.

The Pixel Launcher is due for an upgrade

While Google regularly updates its Pixel phones with new features through its quarterly Feature Drops, most of these are buried inside menus and windows in the Pixel Launcher. The surface of the Pixel Launcher has remained relatively unchanged for years.

Samsung’s One UI 7 showed what a refreshed Android skin can look like. While the change isn’t without its critics, Samsung successfully upgraded One UI without making it feel like a different launcher.

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