Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google offers several tools for Android users to identify music that they hear playing.
- While Pixel Now Playing and your Google account’s web history have included past song searches, a similar view has been missing from the Google app itself.
- Now the Google app’s song search tool includes a song history view in its latest beta release.
Your search history can be a powerful tool, and that’s not just true when we’re talking about what you’ve been up to in your browser. Your YouTube history, for instance, offers a convenient way to look back on the media you’ve been checking out, and can be invaluable when you’re trying to track down a clip you recently watched, but now can’t quite remember all the details of. Now Google’s bringing search history to a new corner of Android, as the platform’s song-search tool gets a memory.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Google makes it easy to find the name of a song that’s playing on Android, offering several tools that connect to its music-ID service. Earlier this year, we spotted development work towards adding a new song history view that would keep track of previously identified tracks. And while that wasn’t operational at the time, we can confirm that it’s now becoming available for beta testers.
Running the new version 16.13.38 beta release of the Google app for Android, we can now access a record of past songs identified by Google’s tool. While you’ve previously been able to access these songs through your account’s search history on the web, or with Now Playing on Pixel phones, there wasn’t a similar option baked in to the song search tool here.
Look for the new history icon at the top-right corner of the app’s song search interface. While we were able to activate that before, when we tapped through to the “Recent song searches” screen, the page was blank. Google has now populated it with thumbnails, song and artist info, and details of when you performed the search. Tapping on any of these entries will run a Google Search on the song.
It’s not like this changes how well Google is able to recognize songs at all, but we still appreciate this effort to bring the Google app’s song search history up to the same level as Now Playing’s. We’ve spotted some other tweaks to how Google recognizes songs that are still in the works, but hopefully those will be entering public beta soon, just like this.
