Android 17 Beta 3 hints at a new home screen ‘organizer’ for Pixel

Android 17 Beta 3 landed on Pixel phones yesterday. There are a handful of small, thoughtful changes included in the update, including the option to hide app names on your home screen and separate quick settings toggles for mobile data and Wi-Fi. Poking around the release, we also managed to get a peek at a work-in-progress feature that’s not yet officially available: an “organizer” utility that can arrange entire home screens for you.

In a future release, this feature should allow users to create, delete, and rearrange home screens. When you’re creating a home screen, your Pixel will offer to automatically populate it with apps and widgets of a certain type — frequently used, games, social media, and more.

After choosing an app category for your new home screen panel, you’ll be able to choose from a handful of different layouts to arrange relevant app icons and widgets. It seems like app categories will be pulled from Play Store info; we were able to surface Most used, Games, Health & Fitness, Productivity, Travel, and Social categories.

The in-progress version of the feature we experimented with wasn’t fully functional, as you can see from the placeholder graphics in our screenshots (we didn’t add the blue circles and pink rectangles to the images; those were actually present in the UI). This functionality will also allow users to rearrange and delete entire home screen panels without having to mess with individual app icons, something not currently possible on Pixel phones.

We don’t know for sure that this feature will release with the name organizer attached, but that’s how it’s referred to in strings we found in the Android 17 Beta 3 code.

And as is always the case with our previews of in-development features, we also don’t know exactly when to expect this feature to land on our devices. The rough edges we’re seeing today could mean it’s a ways out yet — possibly intended to release in stable Android 17 later this year.