Google is working to bring a beloved iPhone wallpaper feature to Pixels

The iPhone-ification of Pixels has been underway for a while now. We’ve seen Google adopt iPhone’s Contact Posters in the form of Calling Cards through the Contacts app. More recently, we’ve seen Apple’s Handoff feature take form on Pixels as Continue On. There’s more “inspiration” on the way: Google could soon let you set a shuffling library of your favorite photos as your wallpaper, much like you already can on iPhones.

In Android 17 QPR1 beta 5, we’ve spotted clues for a new Photo Shuffle feature that looks (and even sounds) like iOS’ Photo Shuffle.

Here’s an early look at the upcoming Photo Shuffle option within the Pixel’s Wallpaper & style app:

As the description states, Photo Shuffle lets you create an album of your favorite people and pets to automatically shuffle through as your phone wallpaper.

Users can select an existing album to cycle through its contents, or create a new album with people and pet photos of their choice. Since this is an early look, we couldn’t get either button to work. We don’t know if these buttons will hook into your Google Photos library, but there’s a decent chance they will, since the Wallpaper & style app already (optionally) connects to your Google Photos account to suggest photos to set as wallpapers.

How frequently will the app shuffle between wallpapers? We could spot options for hourly, daily, sunrise and sunset, and on tap.

Pixel’s Wallpaper & style app already has a wallpaper shuffling feature, but it’s fairly hidden and doesn’t give users much control over which photos to shuffle or the shuffle interval. You have to navigate to Settings > Wallpaper & style > More wallpapers, select a Collection, and then tap the rather unobvious and non-descriptive button in the top-right corner to shuffle between wallpapers from that collection.

On the other hand, iOS presents Photo Shuffle as a prominent option when setting a wallpaper. You can access the feature by navigating to Settings > Wallpaper > Add New Wallpaper and clicking on the prominent “Photo Shuffle” button at the top, where you can multi-select from album options like People, Nature, Cities (all from your photo library), or a specific Photos album or even a manual selection of up to 50 images. Shuffle frequency can be set as On Tap, On Lock, Hourly, or Daily.

Pixel users have been requesting wallpaper photo shuffling for years at this point. Since no native solution has existed so far, they’ve had to make do with third-party apps, which end up draining their batteries due to frequent wakelocks. It’s great to see Google finally working to bring this feature to Pixel users, but we hope it’s as prominent and easy to access as it is on iOS. If Google is going to copy functionality, it may as well get it right.