Android 12 Beta 4 brings a faster search experience

With the release of Android 12 Beta 4 yesterday, Google's new generation of mobile operating system has finally reached a milestone in platform stability. Soon, Google is expected to officially announce the arrival of Android 12 at the fall Pixel 6 series hardware launch conference. Although the latest beta version does not bring any noteworthy new features or UI changes, it does give us our first taste of the fast global search experience.

As early as the Android 12 Beta 2 stage, we have noticed some improvements to the Pixel Launcher.

Now, the new search experience is finally accessible in Android 12 Beta 4 — although it requires root access beforehand.

As shown in the picture, the new search bar replaces the current Google App-powered search widget in the Pixel launcher.

However, the Google App search bar on the home screen remains firmly there.

Users can quickly find apps, shortcuts, widgets, settings, contacts, conversations, tips, and more with the new search bar.

Users can also choose what search results pop up, or set whether they want the virtual keyboard to open automatically when the search bar is displayed.

In comparison, the old search bar would only open the Google App, leading many to complain that the experience was laggy and slow.

The new search bar also allows you to jump directly to specific parts of an app from the App Drawer. For example, when searching for the "Camera" app, options such as video recording, selfie, and jumping to the album are provided.

In addition, the new search bar in Pixel Launcher also utilizes the AppSearch API introduced in Android 12 Beta 3.

As a completely offline device-side search library, developers can integrate it into their own applications on demand to bring a rich full-text search experience.

Finally, a new service called AiAiSearchUiService has been added to the Android system intelligence application, and XDA-Developers also managed to enable this new search feature in the Pixel launcher.

The service is set as the system default search UI service on Pixel phones and is defined by the config_defaultSearchUiService framework configuration value, but is not available in earlier Android 12 preview versions.