Here are some new features of Pixel Launcher in Android 15

The app that launches your phone’s home screen is called a launcher, and thanks to Android’s customizability, there are plenty of Android home screen launchers to choose from. Most people stick with the default home screen launcher, which in the case of Google’s Pixel phones is called Pixel Launcher. Pixel Launcher may not be as customizable as, say, Nova Launcher, but it continues to add new features with each Android release. The upcoming Android 15 update will be no exception as the new release prepares to tweak several aspects of the app launch experience.

For starters, Google is preparing to tweak the animation that plays when you swipe up on an app to return to the home screen. The new animation is faster, more elastic and better highlights the background zoom effect. Here’s a screenshot comparing the home page animation in Android 14 vs. Android 15 Beta 1.

Next, Pixel Launcher is preparing to improve its widget recommendations in Android 15. Currently, when you open the widget picker in Pixel Launcher, a seemingly random widget will appear at the top of the page. There’s no real explanation as to why Pixel Launcher decides to recommend a particular widget, but luckily with the new recommendation system, you’ll have more recommendations to choose from. In addition, the recommendations are categorized by type, making it easy to find the widget that fits your home screen needs.

During testing, I noticed three categories of recommendations: Essentials, Social and Entertainment. However, a quick look at the Pixel Launcher code reveals five other categories that can appear, including Health & Fitness, News & Magazines, Suggested for You, Your Chill Zone, and Weather. Interestingly, I was recommended some widgets from third-party apps, which suggests that Pixel Launcher may be using some algorithmic approach to recommendations rather than just using a hard-coded list.

Another widget-related improvement in Android 15 is the addition of a “+ Add” button to the Pixel Launcher’s widget selector. This button makes adding a widget to the home screen a little easier as you will no longer have to press and hold and then drag the widget. Instead, you can simply tap “+ Add” and Pixel Launcher will automatically add the widget of your choice to the empty spot on your home screen.

Lastly, the Pixel Launcher in Android 15 is also gearing up to improve the recent screen UI. The recent information screen, in case you’re not aware, actually runs a module within the boot application called QuickStep. The recent screen in Android 14 consists of a horizontal carousel of recently opened apps. That doesn’t change in Android 15, but what does change is the way to access the menu, where there are buttons to open the app’s information page, enter split-screen mode, and pause the app.

In Android 14, this menu is accessed by long-pressing the app icon on the recents screen. This may not be obvious to some users, causing them to miss these shortcuts entirely. Android 15 could fix this by adding a small tablet at the top of each app on the recents screen. This tablet contains an application icon, a name, and a drop-down arrow that opens the aforementioned menu. Hopefully this change should make these buttons easier to discover.

All of the Pixel Launcher changes I’ve documented in this article aren’t live yet in Android 15 beta 1. In order to show them off, I had to manually enable some tags. Therefore, it is possible that one or more of these changes will not be released in the stable version of Android 15, which will drop later this year. However, these subtle changes improve the app launch experience, so I don’t see why they shouldn’t be implemented. Since the Pixel Launcher only ships on Google’s own Pixel devices, it’s unclear how many of these changes will make it to the stock launcher in AOSP, so it remains to be seen if devices from other OEMs will receive any of these changes in their respective Android 15 updates.