Android Nougat’s ‘flowered’ home button animation will be tied to Google Assistant, and it looks awesome

We’ve seen several big leaks over the past few weeks in regard to the upcoming release of Android Nougat, however within those we’ve seen one common element, a “flowered” home button. Usually Google’s home button in the navigation bar is a constant icon, but in this upcoming release it looks as though that might change, and now Android Police has gotten their hands on a new GIF showing off what the animation will look like, and revealing its purpose.

As you can see in the GIF below, long pressing on the home button will trigger this animation which sends four colored dots out of the button and shows a quick animation. As expect, this is used as an indicator for Google Assistant. Currently a long-press on the home button triggers Now on Tap, so this new animation on the on-screen software keys leads us to believe that Now on Tap could be seeing a few changes in Nougat.

Android Police further proves that this feature is tied to Assistant/Now on Tap since disabling Google Now on the device apparently also removes the animation. Considering this feature is set to launch with Google Assistant, we can assume that it also won’t be available at launch as Assistant is being developed to launch alongside Google’s upcoming Nexus devices.