Android 11 contains a fair few changes in how media playback is handled across the user experience. The first Developer Preview tested off the controversial move of shifting the music player notification up to the Quick Settings panel. Beta 1 made the feature accessible, while Beta 2 enables it by default. Then there are Media Controls that make it easy to switch the output device for audio and video, even letting the phone remember up to 5 previous media sessions across reboots. Now, information has surfaced that Google maybe including another change in Android 11, removing the ability to see album art previewed across the whole lockscreen.

Whenever you have music playing on your device on previous versions of Android, the album art from the music is stretched across the lockscreen. Android 10 even applied a slight blur effect to the artwork. So throughout your playlist, you would have different album artworks displayed across your lockscreen. This was a small and temporary, yet refreshing change to the UX, one that went back to displaying your set wallpaper once you stop music playback.

As it turns out, Google has decided to remove the ability to show album art on the lockscreen on Android R / Android 11, as confirmed on the Google Issue Tracker.

We no longer show album art on the lock screen in R. comment #1 : Has been fixed on our internal build (which is ahead of the public release) & will be available in future.

Users were initially pointing out how the lockscreen album art disappears if face unlock is enabled, presuming a bug. However, the bug is the appearance in the first place, as Google no longer intends to have the album art showing up across the lockscreen on Android 11. Why? We don't really know, as no real reason or explanation has been provided for this move.

Android 11 News on XDA

As the comment mentions, the issue has been "fixed" in the internal Android 11 releases. So with the stable rollout of Android 11, expected around September 8, 2020, we will no longer have this temporary spruce up in lockscreen visuals.


Source: Google Issue Tracker

Story Via: /r/AndroidApps

Thanks to XDA Senior Member AndroidDeveloperLB for the tip!