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It might be difficult to remap Pixel 2’s squeezable shortcut
by Brian Reigh15 minutes ago
EDITOR'S PICK
Google Pixel 2 XL unboxing and first impressions
Google is fast becoming an AI-first company, and to really put AI at the core of the smartphone experience, it needs to control the entire stack, including services, software, and hardware. Enter the Google Pixel 2 …
Apart from their exceptional cameras and unadulterated software, what make the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL unique are their squeezable frames. Not unlike what HTC did with the U11, you can gently squeeze the phone’s side frames to summon Google Assistant. Unfortunately, however, it seems like you might be out of luck if you’re not a huge fan of Google’s AI assistant – according to XDA-Developers, remapping this squeezable shortcut function is proving to be quite a challenge.
The folks over at XDA-Developers first tried AutoVoice to replace Google Assistant with another app, but that apparently disables the squeezable shortcut feature altogether. That’s because the Active Edge functionality is hardcoded to launch only Google Assistant. As Mishaal Rahman explains:
We can see here that when the service detects a squeeze gesture, it performs a LaunchOpa action. It checks for two flags. [The first checks] to see if Active Edge is actually enabled in settings [and the second] checks if Settings.Secure.Assistant (the preference that holds the current Assistant component) is set to… the component for Google Assistant. In essence, Google hardcoded the squeeze function to only open the current assistant app if that assistant is Google Assistant.
As the website points out, it is possible to have a system where it launches a pre-designated app when it detects that Google Assistant is open. However, as you may have guessed, that means you will never be able to use Google Assistant on your phone because the system will have no way of knowing whether the AI assistant was launched via voice or squeezable gesture. Of course, it’s possible that Google will give third-party developers access to Active Edge in the future, but until then, it looks like you will have to be content with Google Assistant.