Android 12 May Let You Search Your Phone Only, Instead Of The Web

The 2d developer preview (DP2) of Android 12 is out in the wild and it'south offering a ton of new features fully expected to land with the OS update. Merely Android 12 DP2 may too hint at a new search bar for an Android phone instead of the full web not previously seen in the code, sources propose. Or at least that may exist the case for Pixel phones since that's where it was activated in its beta form.

How is this new Android 12 search different from what'southward already on your telephone?

Found starting time in the Pixel Launcher with Android 12 DP2, the new option starts off as dissimilar as tin be from the current Google Assistant search bar institute on an Android 11 telephone. That'southward because it starts past seeming to have equally little to practise with Google as possible. Beginning by abandoning Google logos and other Google services.

Instead, the search results found in the new search bar are just for on-device items. And the results also appear to be kept local. At that place's no manner to utilize the search bar to search the spider web at all.

As shown in the images included beneath, users can also adjust exactly what is searched for. For instance, users can choose to enable app results, to search their app library. They tin as well enable search results for shortcuts, settings, contacts, slices from apps, widgets, the Google Play Store, and "nasa." With each having its own toggle in settings.

The final of those search result types, conversely, is a consummate unknown. The 'nasa' results would presumably exist labeled "NASA" if they had anything to do with the spacefaring organization. And so it's soon idea that 'nasa' is a codename for something else.

Is this coming?

As noted earlier, this is still a very experimental characteristic. The UI itself appears unfinished and information technology wasn't fully functional either. Setting bated that it had to exist activated separately in the Google Pixel Launcher as well, potentially pointing to a Pixel-specific Android 12 feature.

Android 12 is expected to exist ready for launch old in August, in the interim. And Google will scroll that update out to Pixel handsets in short order, following that annunciation. So it shouldn't take too long, at the very least, before everybody's given a better wait at exactly what Google'south aiming for with the newly spotted characteristic.