If the search bar at the bottom of the Pixel Launcher looks slightly different, it’s because Google made things a little higher.
The pill-shaped search bar is now just a few pixels taller. This change also applies to the Search home screen widget in the Google app.
A slightly more obvious change is how Google increased the size of the Lens, voice search, and AI Mode icons (or the set shortcut). This makes things look a little more proportional.
Old versus new
Stepping away, Google scrapped the Material 3 Expressive redesign of the Pixel Launcher search bar last December. Google app intentionally unified device search replaced Basically, to give AI mode more prominence once you’ve started searching.
In addition to unified search now only available when you open the app drawer, the fact that Google reverted to the previous search bar design didn’t seem very modern. The current height adjustment helps a little to solve that problem, but the unified search for devices is greatly missed.
Search bar settings were implemented with version 17.32 of the Google app, which is now widely available on the stable channel. This is not a change from Android 17, with the above Android 16 screenshots.
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