Explaining Android
With 2 simple ADB commands, we can force the Google Search widget on the Home Screen to work as a unified search across the entire device instead of just performing a search on the web.
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Video Description
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Google is the king of search but if you try to use the plethora or search bars on a Google Pixel smartphone then you’re likely going to get a different experience on each one. For example, if we use the Google Search widget at the bottom of the Pixel Launcher then it’s going to want to do a search on the web.
However, if you do the same thing from the search bar at the top of the App Drawer on Android 13 then you’re likely going to be getting different results.
That’s because the search bar at the top of the App Drawer also wants to surface results from within your smartphone or tablet.
With the launch of Android 13 beta 2, we noticed that Google had unified these two search boxes. This resulted in us having the ability to search through our device when using this widget at the bottom of the Home Screen of the Pixel Launcher.
Sadly, the stable release of Android 13 has disabled this feature and we’re not really sure why. Google could work to improve the feature a bit more, but it worked really well during the beta so it’s removal is surprising to many of us.
Thankfully, this feature hasn’t been removed, though, it’s just been disabled via software. And that means we’re able to turn it back on with a couple of ADB Shell commands.
This process does require you to have ADB & Fastboot tools installed, so if you’re not familiar with that, look in the video description below for a direct link on how to install that to your PC. We also need to have USB Debugging Mode enabled as well. And you’ll find a link on how to do that down there as well.
With all of that setup, let’s go ahead and connect our smartphone to the PC with a USB cable and open up a command prompt in the same folder as our ADB & Fastboot tools.
With these commands executed in the command prompt, we’re now able to use this unified search feature right from the Google Search widget on our homescreen.
Mentioned Commands
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adb shell
cmd device_config put launcher enable_one_search true
am force-stop com.google.android.apps.nexuslauncher
Mentioned Links
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Install ADB & Fastboot – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic5HIG4r8cE
Developer Mode – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwR2HIstT-c
USB Debugging Mode – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdaNab8iVXA
Reddit – https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/wrlvro/how_to_make_the_pixel_launchers_unified_search/
Making the Change Stick – https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/wgai01/comment/iiz9car/
Step by Step Tutorial
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1. Intro [00:00]
2.
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The Gear I Use
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5W “Slow” Charger – https://amzn.to/2OaUMV8
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onn 4K Android TV – https://bit.ly/3hHCpTc
NVIDIA Shield TV – https://bit.ly/3KA17RV