Android Canary delivers a Now Playing lock screen shortcut

Locking your smartphone is an important step that practically everyone should take, helping to protect your device and keep your private information secure. And while the lock screen serves a critical role, it also makes getting access to anything on our phone that much slower. Thankfully, Google has offered a few ways to mitigate that impact, and maybe the most useful there is Android’s support for lock screen shortcuts. With today’s release of the first public Android Canary build, we’ve spotted the company’s latest.

With the new Android Canary release, we’ve spotted the presence of a new “Now Playing” option.

Google has given Android users a few different solutions for identifying songs over the years, including Now Playing on Pixel phones — even if that has been a little wonky lately. We’ve recently spotted evidence that developers have been paying a bit more attention to the tool, though, working on things like a Quick Settings tile. And now this lock screen shortcut feels like it fits in perfectly with that sort of effort.

Right now your only way to try this out for yourself is to install an Android Canary build on your Pixel 6 or newer, but considering Google’s dire warning about system stability, you should not feel remotely bad about preferring to wait things out until this is available in a slightly more stable form.