The bigMarch 2024 Pixel Feature Drophas arrived — well, technically it won’t start rolling out in the US until next week, but it’s already going live in some markets — and the headlining feature is that Google’s newCircle to Searchutility is becoming available on older Pixel phones, namely the 7 and 7 Pro. Usually, these things take a matter of days, if not weeks, to hit actual phones in the wild, but this particular feature seems to be arriving sooner than any of us expected.
Google’s March Feature Drop is here, but not for you
The new release will roll out March 11 in the US, while everyone else will get it starting today
After spottinga user on Redditclaiming that they had already received the new feature on their Pixel 7 Pro just hours after its announcement, we did some investigating on our own Pixel 7 and were able to get Circle to Search working as well. The Reddit user was running the latest Android beta build, but that doesn’t seem to be a factor here, as our Pixel 7 is running Android 14 stable with the February 5 security patches and the January 2024 Google Play System Update.
The main factor in triggering Circle to Search appears to be an update to the Google app — we first had the feature become available after updating to the latest beta build of the Google app (15.9.47.29), as did the poster on Reddit. However, we were also able to get the feature working with the latest stable build of the Google app (15.7.52.28). It’s possible that installing the beta initially had triggered the feature’s availability, even after switching back to the stable version, but it’s also possible that it’s being controlled by a server-side flag and that the timing of our updating was coincidental.
Circle to Search working on the Pixel 7
If you’d like to try it for yourself, you can sideloadthe latest Google app betafrom APKMirror or update tothe stable versionwe found to be working. The feature seems to require a SystemUI relaunch after updating the Google app, so you’ll likely have to restart your phone before the new long-press shortcut on the gesture bar becomes active. If you have any success, we’d appreciate it if you’d share your app and system version numbers in the comments below for posterity.
Thanks: Armando
