Google is working to bring album art to Now Playing on your Pixel's lock screen (Updated)

Update, July 14, 2025 (01:04 PM ET): We’ve got one quick addition to make to our previous reporting on Google’s work towards a new UI for Now Playing on the lock screen.

When we looked at this in-development tweak that adds album art to Now Playing last week, we hadn’t yet defined a default music player in our testing environment. Once setting one, we see that an icon for the player now appears next to the favorites icon in the Now Playing bar.

Hitting that icon will take you straight to the associated app — once you unlock your device, of course.

Original article, July 11, 2025 (05:09 PM ET): Sometimes, when it rains, it pours. As we analyze Android app updates for evidence of in-development changes, it can really feel like it’s dealer’s (or should we say, developer’s) choice, and it can be weeks or months before we find ourselves revisiting a specific feature. But this week we’re retuning to one topic just a single day after we last checked in, as we look into what Google’s working on for its Now Playing song-ID tool.

Last time around, we had just installed the new Android Canary release and saw Google adding a Now Playing option for our screen-corner lock screen shortcuts. That sounds well and good, but we also really like the way Now Playing works automatically on our lock screens, just displaying the song it’s hearing without any extra interaction needed on our part.

Right now, Now Playing on the lock screen is basically all text, just showing you the song and artist it’s detected. From there you’re welcome to tap through to your Now Playing history, where you get a richer experience with album art and links to YouTube and YouTube Music.

Looking into a recent Android System Intelligence update, however, we’ve been able to get an early preview of some new behavior from this feature. Instead of jumping right into your history upon tapping, Google is thinking about an interface where Now Playing would start with its familiar text display, but then tapping it would expand that to offer a bar with album art.

We also get quick access to the favorite button over on the right, and can add or remove tracks from that list with a tap. And if you do need to access your full history, you can get there with a double tap.

Frankly, we wish Google would think about removing that first step and make this new look the default for Now Playing on the lock screen, instead of needing us to tap for the art. But who knows? Right now this is still very much in active development, and we just might get an option like that by the time Google’s ready to formally introduce it.