Android 11 might move music player to Quick Settings, but it looks kinda weird

If you’re listening to music using your Android phone, a quick swipe down on the notification shade will show you a nifty little player. Using this you can pause/play, skip tracks, or quickly open your music app, all right from the shade. However, in Android 11, this might change.

According to some testing conducted by XDA Developers, the first Developer Preview has a feature that moves the music player from the notification shade to the Quick Settings section.

This feature isn’t turned on by default, XDA needed to do some code tinkering to manually switch it on. In other words, this is likely something Google is just experimenting with and it may not ever see the light of day.

Judging from how it looks, it might be best if Google doesn’t do this. See for yourself below:

Obviously, this feature is a work-in-progress so it’s not expected to look polished, but it does seem like a bit of an eyesore.

While it’s not clear why Google would want to do this, the best explanation we can come up with is to help prevent the music player from knocking down the shade. If you swipe down your shade hoping to see your music player at the top but instead find it further down underneath the new Conversations tab, that could get annoying. Keeping the player in Quick Settings would prevent that.

However, we hope Google comes up with a more elegant way of doing this. It’s a good idea but this doesn’t seem like the right solution. What do you think? Sound off in the comments!