Ryan Haines / Android Authority TL;DR Now Playing detects songs your phone hears in its vicinity and can identify them on your lock screen. Tapping on the detected song name currently takes you to your Now Playing history. Google is working on a new interface where that tap would instead display album art on the lock screen. Sometimes, when it rains, it pours. As we analyze Android app updates for evidence of in-development changes, it can really feel like it’s dealer’s (or should we say, developer’s) choice, and it can be weeks or months before we find ourselves revisiting a specific feature. But this week we’re retuning to one topic just a single day after we last checked in, as we look into what Google’s working on for its Now Playing song-ID tool. Authority Insights story on Android Authority. Discover You're reading anstory on Android Authority. Discover Authority Insights for more exclusive reports, app teardowns, leaks, and in-depth tech coverage you won't find anywhere else. 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. Last time around, we had just installed the new Android Canary release and saw Google adding a Now Playing option for our screen-corner lock screen shortcuts. That sounds well and good, but we also really like the way Now Playing works automatically on our lock screens, just displaying the song it’s hearing without any extra interaction needed on our part. Right now, Now Playing on the lock screen is basically all text, just showing you the song and artist it’s detected. From there you’re welcome to tap through to your Now Playing history, where you get a richer experience with album art and links to YouTube and YouTube Music. Looking into a recent Android System Intelligence update, however, we’ve been able to get an early preview of some new behavior from this feature. Instead of jumping right into your history upon tapping, Google is thinking about an interface where Now Playing would start with its familiar text display, but then tapping it would expand that to offer a bar with album art. We also get quick access to the favorite button over on the right, and can add or remove tracks from that list with a tap. And if you do need to access your full history, you can get there with a double tap. Frankly, we wish Google would think about removing that first step and make this new look the default for Now Playing on the lock screen, instead of needing us to tap for the art. But who knows? Right now this is still very much in active development, and we just might get an option like that by the time Google’s ready to formally introduce it. Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at Email our staff at [email protected] . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.