Here are some new features of the Pixel Launcher in Android 15

The app that powers your phone’s home screen is called a launcher, and thanks to Android customization, 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. The Pixel Launcher may not be as customizable as, say, Nova Launcher, but it continues to add new features with each Android version. The upcoming Android 15 update will be no exception, as the new version prepares to change several aspects of the app launching experience.

For starters, Google is preparing to change the animation that appears when you swipe up on an app to return to the home screen. The new animation is faster, more elastic and better highlights the zoom effect of the wallpaper. Here’s a screen recording that compares the swipe-to-home animation in Android 14 versus Android 15 Beta 1.

Next, Pixel Launcher is gearing up 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 chooses to recommend a particular widget, but luckily with the new recommendation system you’ll have more recommendations to choose from. Plus, recommendations are categorized by type, making it easy to find a widget that suits your home screen needs.

During my testing, I spotted three categories of recommendations: Essential, Social and Entertainment. However, a quick look at Pixel Launcher’s code reveals five other categories that may appear, including Health & Fitness, News & Magazines, Suggested for You, Your Chill Zone, and Weather. Interestingly, some third-party app widgets were recommended to me, which suggests that Pixel Launcher may be using an algorithmic approach to recommendations instead of just using a hard-coded list.

Another widget-related improvement in Android 15 is the addition of a “+Add” button to the Pixel Launcher widget picker. This button makes it slightly easier to add a widget to the Home screen, as you will no longer need to long-press and then drag the widget. Instead, you can simply tap “+Add” and Pixel Launcher will automatically add the widget of your choice to an empty slot on the home screen.

Finally, the Pixel Launcher in Android 15 is also gearing up to improve the recent screen UI. The recent screen, in case you didn’t know, is actually powered by a module of the system launcher application called QuickStep. Android 14’s Recent screen consists of a horizontal carousel of recently opened apps. This does not change in Android 15, but what changes is the method of accessing the menu where the buttons are located to open the application information page, enter split screen mode and suspend an application.

In Android 14, this menu is accessible by long-pressing an app icon in the recent 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 pill to the top of each app in the recent apps screen. This pill contains the app icon, its name, and a drop-down arrow that opens the aforementioned menu. We hope this change should make these buttons more easily discoverable.

All of the Pixel Launcher changes I documented in this article are not yet available in Android 15 beta 1. In order to view them, I had to enable some flags manually. So, it is possible that one or more of these changes will not be released in the stable version of Android 15, which will be released later this year. However, these subtle changes improve the experience of launching apps, so I don’t see why they won’t be rolled out. Since Pixel Launcher only ships on Google’s Pixel devices, it’s unclear how many of these changes will be made to the stock launcher in AOSP. So it remains to be seen whether devices from other OEMs will benefit from any of these changes in their respective Android 15 updates.