4 features you need to try on your Pixel

A little over a week ago, Google started rolling out the latest update to Android 17 Beta – specifically, Android 17 Beta 3. Beta 1 and Beta 2 both appeared to be very light on user-facing changes, and Beta 3 has already shown that it has a lot so much to offer.

I’ve had Android 17 Beta 3 downloaded on one of my Pixels since its release, and after my first week with it, there are four features in particular that I can’t get enough of.

If there’s one notable feature of Android 17 Beta 3, it’s app bubbles. Google first announced app bubbles alongside the release of Android 17 Beta 2 back in February, but they weren’t actually available for use until last week in Beta 3. And as it turned out, it was (mostly) worth the wait.

Using app bubbles is easy. On your home screen or app drawer, press and hold the app you want to bubble, then tap the new app bubble icon (the one that looks like a square with a circular arrow). Just like that, the app pops up like a floating bubble. Tapping the app’s icon shrinks the bubble, where it sits on the side of your screen (and can be moved as you wish).

What I love most about app bubbles is that you can have multiple bubble shortcuts at once. I found this very useful for having all my messaging/communication apps in one place. With a single tap on my app’s bubble shortcut, I have quick access to Slack, Google Messages, Gmail, and Telegram. Good.

I’ve been running Android 17 Beta 3 on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and while app bubbles are especially useful on the large internal display, they work well on the cover screen, too. I agree with my colleague Zac that app bubbles are wrong – that is, restrictions on how you open and close bubbles – but Google has a good start here.

In Android 16 and earlier versions, your Wi-Fi and mobile data are hidden behind the internet tile in your quick settings. As such, turning one on/off is a two-step process: tap the Internet tile, then tap Wi-Fi or toggle data. It’s unnecessarily redundant, and thankfully, Android 17 Beta 3 fixes it.

My Pixel has a habit of sticking to my home Wi-Fi connection away longer than it should, which means if I’m in my car or walking my dog ​​around my apartment, I have to go to the internet tile to manually disable Wi-Fi to use my phone’s data. Now, I can kill my Pixel’s Wi-Fi with one tap instead of two. That may not sound very exciting, but for something I do several times a day, this has been a life saver.

As I have been using Gemini a lot on my phone, I have been facing an annoying problem. I don’t like how loud Gemini reads its answers, so whenever I ask it something, I immediately look for my phone’s rocker to turn it down. However, if I go to watch a YouTube video or something on Instagram, I have to turn the volume back up to hear it. Then I ask Gemini something again, it has to turn down the volume again – an endless cycle.

Thankfully, Android 17 Beta 3 has a solution to this. If you open the Settings app and press Noise and vibrationyou will get a new “assistant volume” slider. This allows you to set the volume level of your phone’s virtual assistant (like the Gemini) completely different from your media phone’s volume, which the Gemini was previously tied to.

This is another feature that sounds small on paper – especially compared to something like app bubbles – but it directly improves the way I interact with my phone every day. I absolutely love it.

The last feature of Android 17 Beta 3 that I liked is not a practical or functional change like the last two things I talked about, but it is itching to customize the phone.

If you press and hold on your Pixel home screen, tap Wallpaper and style, and press illustrationsyou will see a new “Words” option next to Style & Shape. From here, you can now change the app names to the app icons on your home screen, giving your phone a much cleaner look.

The Pixel Launcher has long lacked proper customization options, but just four months ago, Google did a great job of fixing that. Being able to hide app icon names is one of those basic customization features that is long overdue, and I’m very happy to see it arrive in this latest Android 17 update.

In addition to the above new features, Android 17 Beta 3 also marks Android 17 reaching platform stability for the first time – an important milestone as we approach the full public release of the update.

We expect Google to talk about Android 17 during Google I/O next month, possibly including an announcement of its official release date. Google has previously hinted at a June 2026 release window for Android 17, and hopefully, I/O will give us a solid date to look forward to.

We’re almost there, Android fans.