Google announced the Android 12 developer preview today, and alongside that new features are starting to trickle out such as the customizable media player in quick settings.
If you’re running an Android 11 device, then you probably already know about the quick settings media player. When streaming music or audio through apps like Spotify, YouTube or others, the playback controls now show up in the quick settings drop down instead of as a notification.
With Android 12, Google is letting you customize this media player in at least one way. Something which is likely to be useful to anyone that uses the media player from the quick settings menu.
You can customize the quick settings media player in Android 12
While this is going to customizable, so far it looks like you’ll be able to change just one thing. The ability to toggle on or off which media apps you want to display in the quick settings menu.
In a tweet from Mishaal Rahman, a screenshot from the Android 12 developer preview shows toggles for this functionality. Which you can see in the image below. Currently, if you have multiple media apps open, all of them will be displayed in quick settings. And you can swipe between them.
There is no way to disable individual ones in Android 11. You either accept them all or disable them all. But in Android 12, Google is giving the user a little bit more control here. For instance, you may not want to display the playback controls for YouTube alongside your dedicated music streaming apps like Spotify or YouTube Music. So you will be able to toggle YouTube off.
Of course Android 12 will still let you toggle off the quick settings playback controls altogether. If you so choose.
This feature is still technically in an early stage
It’s worth keeping in mind that this is the very first release of the Android 12 developer preview. And with that, this new customizable media player option is subject to change.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be removed in future releases. But there is always a chance that it could be. Google has after all, removed features from earlier versions of a preview in later versions before. Or Google could simply alter the way that it works down the line.
Either way, having it at this point means that Google is at the very least interested in keeping it. And users would probably agree that it’s a feature that should stay.