Now Playing’s Android overhaul broke one fan-favorite feature

Source: Android Authority

TL;DR

• Now Playing just got a big update this week, including a new status as a stand‑alone app.
• One consequence of these changes appears to be breaking compatibility with history export tools.
• Old tools got song data by way of your notifications, but changes there remove that ability.

New Now Playing Experience

Google’s March Pixel Drop has arrived with a host of new features. Among them is the newly overhauled Now Playing experience, now available as a dedicated app. The update brings visual tweaks such as the new album‑art handling.

Impact on History Export Tools

Now Playing not only listens for the songs playing around you—it also stores that information in your Now Playing history. Users have previously moved that data to other services using tools like Pano Scrobbler, which automatically imports songs detected by Now Playing into Last.fm.

The March update broke this workflow. As explained by developer Kieron Quinn on Reddit, earlier solutions extracted song information from Now Playing’s notifications. Those notifications no longer appear in the same way, so the tools can’t retrieve the data any more.

Community Reaction

Last.fm users such as birbeck1 highlighted the issue on the Pixel subreddit, noting that the ability to sync Now Playing history has been blocked.

What Can Users Do?

At this point, it’s unclear what recourse is available. Google could restore the notifications, but the change was likely intentional. Until an official solution is provided, users may need to wait for third‑party tools to adapt to the new notification system or explore alternative methods of exporting their listening history.