GoKawiilJoe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR Android Authority has found evidence of an in-progress “organizer” feature for home screens on Pixel phones.
The feature would let users create home screens that automatically populate with apps of a specified type, as well as rearrange and delete individual home screens.
We don’t know when the feature is intended to release publicly.
Android 17 Beta 3 landed on Pixel phones yesterday. There are a handful of small, thoughtful changes included in the update, including the option to hide app names on your home screen and separate quick settings toggles for mobile data and Wi-Fi. Poking around the release, we also managed to get a peek at a work-in-progress feature that’s not yet officially available: an “organizer” utility that can arrange entire home screens for you.
In a future release, this feature should allow users to create, delete, and rearrange home screens. When you’re creating a home screen, your Pixel will offer to automatically populate it with apps and widgets of a certain type — frequently used, games, social media, and more.
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After choosing an app category for your new home screen panel, you’ll be able to choose from a handful of different layouts to arrange relevant app icons and widgets. It seems like app categories will be pulled from Play Store info; we were able to surface Most used, Games, Health & Fitness, Productivity, Travel, and Social categories.
The in-progress version of the feature we experimented with wasn’t fully functional, as you can see from the placeholder graphics in our screenshots (we didn’t add the blue circles and pink rectangles to the images; those were actually present in the UI). This functionality will also allow users to rearrange and delete entire home screen panels without having to mess with individual app icons, something not currently possible on Pixel phones.
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