Your Pixel Launcher may be getting a clever new way to make app suggestions

If you’re looking to get the most out of your Pixel phone, enabling app suggestions in your launcher can be a big benefit. Suggestions help surface your most-used apps where you’re likely to need them, and save us from scrolling though the ever-growing list of everything we have installed. Today, we’re checking out one way that Google could be about to make those suggestions even more useful.

If you haven’t thought about app suggestions in a minute, we don’t blame you. Google introduced them all the way back with Android 11, and they probably feel very familiar by now. This is the row you might see at the bottom of your Pixel’s home screen, or up at top of your app drawer, if you’ve got the feature enabled.

While Google hasn’t publicly gone into a lot of detail about how these suggestions are generated, the Home settings screen where you can toggle them on and off offers a basic overview, explaining: “App suggestions are based on your recently used apps, most-used apps, and routines.”

Looking through some of the changes present in version C.8.playstore.pixel11.993387747 of Android System Intelligence, we’ve spotted a small tweak that looks like it references a new factor in how Android makes those suggestions:

So far, we haven’t seen anything to suggest that Google’s looking at our location data when suggesting apps. But when these changes finally go live, the settings screen could start directly referencing location’s role.

At least, that’s one possibility. Right now, it feels like we still don’t have the full picture surrounding this change. At the moment, we’ve only spotted this refreshed text, and haven’t seen any corresponding back-end work to actually change how suggestions are created.

We also can’t help but notice that rather than just adding “location” to the list of factors used in forming suggestions, here it’s instead replacing “routines.” Granted, we could see how that makes sense — if you take an Uber home from yoga class every Friday at 6pm, a suggestion based on location might work as well as one based on the time.

Hopefully, we either manage to spot further updates that answer some of our questions about exactly what’s changing here, or Google just out and announces it — either way’s good with us!