Google's Now Playing Feature Has Been Ported, Coming Soon To All AOSP ROMs

The Pixel 2 had a bunch of incredible (and also exclusive) features under its belt. Firstly, the Pixel 2 can do portrait shots with an incredible bokeh effect with both its front as well as rear camera. Although the rear camera uses the 'dual pixel' technology (along with software optimizations) to take depth-of-field shots, the front camera does them all with the help of AI powered software. We recently saw the front camera's software driven portrait mode ported to other smartphones. Another Pixel 2 exclusive feature was Google Lens. Google Lens has already been rolled out to the first generations Pixel and Pixel XL and Google has said that it will be extending Lens to other smartphones in near future. Lastly, the Pixel 2's Now Playing feature automatically identified songs playing in the background. A developer has now managed to port Pixel 2's Now Playing feature to an AOSP based ROM.

Before you get excited, I would like to inform you that this feature isn't yet available to be used on all devices. This is still a Work-In-Progress (WIP) and it would take time to get this feature working on other smartphones. A developer (who goes by the name frap129) wrote on the XDA forums that he had managed to port this feature to CarbonROM for the Pixel 2 XL. frap129 added that he had to reverse engineer a lot of proprietary Google code to get this feature working. frap129 has said that he is working hard on getting this feature to work on other devices.

Currently, it only works on Pixel devices as we're using the stock Pixel Ambient Services apk. It will likely need to be modified to work on all devices. Currently, its in a semi functioning state on other devices. Can be enabled in settings, but crashed when it detects a song. We're working as hard as we can. Commits will be publicly available once we get everything sorted out.

frap129 has stated that this feature can't be ported using a Magisk module since for implementing Now Playing, system level modifications are required. I'm not sure whether an Xposed module can pull this off, but we will see how that goes whenever the commits of the feature will be released publicly. Also, this feature is likely to work only on Oreo and not on older Android versions.

Owing to the the incredible efforts of hard working developers like frap129, we, the users, have been able to get a taste of almost every software feature that was exclusive to the Pixel 2. Let's hope that frap129 soon gets the feature working on other devices, so that we can try it out on our non-Pixel devices.

Source: XDA forums, Reddit

[Image credit - Google]

Krittin Kalra

Krittin Kalra is a 20 year old Android freak. Striving for passions, chasing down his dreams and living a life without regrets is his sole mantra. A bit moody, he also does custom ROM reviews for AndroGuider. Currently pursuing his B.Tech, he aspires to follow his heart.