Google Pixel’s new Now Playing app breaks third-party history tools
Source: 9to5Google
Google Pixel’s well‑known and beloved Now Playing experience just became its own app, which is great, but it appears to have broken some third‑party history tools that relied on the previous implementation.
As we covered earlier this week, Now Playing on Google Pixel phones is now a standalone app rather than a system component. The update brings a Material 3 Expressive redesign, manual song search, and improved history support.
For the most part, it’s a welcome update, but it has resulted in one unfortunate loss.
Some Pixel users quickly noticed that third‑party tools that leveraged Now Playing to build a functional history list stopped working after the rollout. The new version no longer notifies apps of newly identified songs in the same way the old experience did, which those tools depended on. This issue was pointed out by developer Kieron Quinn on Reddit.
So, for example, Pano Scrubber—an app that could pull data from Now Playing and push it to Last.fm and other services (via Android Authority )—has lost its functionality.
That’s a shame, plain and simple. While this was always a bit of a “hack,” such little conveniences are a big part of why many people love Android. It seems possible Google could address this in a future update, but we’ll have to wait and see.