Google Enables HiLight Feature In Latest Android 17 Beta
Abner Li reports today for 9to5 Google Google has activated its HiLight feature in Tuesday’s release of Android 17 QPR2 Beta 6.1. The tentpole feature, available on Pixel 11 Pro, glows colored light when delivering a message notification.
“When you go to a Google Contacts page, the HiLight bottom sheet shows options for Phone calls and Messages that you can individually enable [or] disable,” Li wrote. “We’re seeing this work with Google Messages today, while there should also be support for WhatsApp since calls already work. When you receive a message, HiLight blinks twice.”
I’ve been meaning to write about HiLights since my close friend and peer Joanna Stern wrote about it on New Things, so seeing Li’s story is a good excuse to finally do so. At a high level, HiLight strikes me as essentially the same, on principle anyway, as Apple’s longstanding LED flash alerts feature for iPhones. Whereas Apple explicitly considers its flash alerts an accessibility feature “for anyone who might miss audible alerts” while Google is pitching HiLights towards the mainstream, it takes neither an accessibility aesthete nor an astrophysicist to surmise the accessibility gains of both. In fact, it could be cogently argued Google’s implementation may be better for certain people because it uses color; Apple, by contrast, only leverages the camera’s built-in flash—available in every color under the rainbow called white. Overall, both Google and Apple’s respective features may as well be twins, conceptually speaking.
As a CODA, both these features remind me of the accessible doorbell my Deaf parents had installed in our apartment growing up. I’ve written about it in the past, but whenever someone would press the doorbell outside, a quick burst of light would emanate inside from the top corner. There was no sound to accompany the visual. Whenever the burst of light appeared, my parents knew someone was at the door and usually yelled at me—yes, deaf people have voices—to go answer it. In retrospect, I wish it did have an audible chime for times when I wasn’t in the living room to see the flash.
