Google Pixel’s new Now Playing app breaks third-party history tools

Ben Schoon | Mar 4 2026 - 9:40 am PT

Google Pixel’s well-known and beloved Now Playing experience just became its own app, which is great, but it comes at the apparent expense of some third-party history tools that have completely stopped working since the change.

As we covered earlier this week, Now Playing on Google Pixel phones is now its own app as opposed to just a part of the system. This includes a Material 3 Expressive makeover, the ability to manually search for songs, and better support for history.

Pixel Now Playing redesign with M3 Expressive rolling out

For the most part, it’s a welcome update, but it has resulted in one unfortunate loss.

Some Google Pixel users quickly noticed that some third-party tools that would leverage Now Playing to build up a functional history list have broken since the update rolled out. As it turns out, the new version doesn’t notify you of newly-identified songs in the same way as the old experience, which is what those third-party apps were relying on to build out a history list. This was pointed out by developer Kieron Quinn.

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So in the case of something like Pano Scrubber, an app that could pull data from Now Playing and push that into Last.fm and other apps (via Android Authority), the functionality is simply broken.

That’s a shame, plain and simple, as while this was always a bit of a “hack,” little things like this are a big part of why so many people like Android. It seems entirely possible Google could fix this down the road, but we’ll just have to wait and see.