Now Playing feature from Pixel 2 has been ported to an AOSP ROM

CarbonROM, an Android image based on the Android Open Source Project code, now has one feature that was exclusive to the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL — always-on music detection and the Now Playing notification that can be displayed on the lock screen.

Developer frap129 told XDA-Developer that he had to “reverse engineer a lot of proprietary Google code” to make the feature work. Unfortunately, it is only available on CarbonROM for the Pixel 2 XL, but if users were to port the ROM into their device, at least they would still have one of the nifty Google-made features that would have otherwise been lost.

Still, frap129 hopes that there’s enough of a blueprint to port this feature onto Android devices other than the Pixel 2. In fact, there may be potential to even enable a more customizable lock screen text notification feature based off of other ambient data collection — there is already a root-access app to show the title and creator lines for tracks played on the device on the ambient display lock screen of the Pixels.