Wild Android 11 test puts a music player in the Quick Settings panel

The first Android 11 developer preview is out and we’ve already covered some of the changes we found from Android 10 so far. The latest iteration of Android also comes with some new privacy and security features, along with a few new features for developers. But that’s not all. Google is scheduled to roll out two more developer previews and three betas before the final stable release and while the company won’t be announcing any of the new features till Google I/O 2020, we’ll continue to tinker with the latest build to find upcoming features in Android 11. We’ve already uncovered several such features, including a new increased touch sensitivity option for the Pixel 4, a Motion Sense gesture for controlling music playback on the device, new screenshot previews, and even a fully redesigned Notification History page. And now, our Editor-in-Chief Mishaal Rahman has managed to manually enable a new feature that puts a music player in the Quick Settings in the notification shade.

In current builds of Android, whenever you’re listening to music on your phone a music player appears in the notifications shade. Sometimes, when you receive too many notifications, the music player is moved to the bottom and you have to open the notification shade all the way in order to access it. This could prove to be a bit of an annoyance, especially if you’re someone who receives a ton of notifications.

It seems like Google is aware of this issue and might be addressing it in a future build of Android 11 by putting the music player in the Quick Settings panel. As you can see in the screenshots above, the music player will appear as a part of the Quick Settings panel right next to the other toggles. In order to accommodate the music player, the Quick Settings panel will expand from one to two rows and will display the Quick Settings toggles on one side, while the music player will take up the other side.

Opening the Quick Settings panel completely by swiping down once again will move the music player to the bottom of the panel, with all the toggles right above it. In a bid to accommodate the music player, the Quick Settings panel will take up more space than it does currently but, on the positive side, the music player will always be accessible right at the top. As of now, this feature is not accessible by default on the first Android 11 developer preview and we had to manually enable it in order to take these screenshots. It’s also worth mentioning that this is one of several UI tests in Android 11, so it may or may not appear in the stable build. In case it does, there’s also a chance that Google might make some significant changes to it before launch.