HiLight Studio supercharges your Pixel 11 Pro’s HiLight LED

The Pixel 11 Professional collection has a new “HiLight” LED system constructed across the digicam’s flash on the again of the system. HiLight can be utilized as a notification LED to let you realize about calls out of your favourite contacts, and it additionally glows while you’re having a Gemini dialog… and that’s about it. HiLight has loads of potential, however disappointingly, Google hasn’t blessed it with much functionality out of the field. If you would like extra out of HiLight and are okay with taking issues into your individual arms, the open-source HiLight Studio app supercharges Pixel 11 Professional’s HiLight LED so it’s really helpful.

HiLight Studio is an open-source app by YouTuber-turned-vibecoder Dhananjay Bhosale that expands HiLight’s performance past simply favourite calls and Gemini, permitting you to configure the notification LED to work with any app you select. The HiLight LED will be activated both when the app sends you a notification, when it’s open, or each if you’d like. You may set any shade for any app, and even go crazier with a number of sample choices like comet, pulse, breathe, wave, and even rainbow.

For those who can’t determine which choice to decide on, HiLight Studio additionally allows you to save presets and import or export them for backup and sharing. Additional, you may also pull in colours out of your wallpaper when you’re gunning for a cohesive search for your telephone.

Past customization, HiLight Studio additionally offers you full, simple management over all its HiLight performance. It comes with a Fast Settings tile that permits you to toggle its options on and off with out opening the app. It additionally respects your Do Not Disturb settings, and you may also set quiet hours individually. HiLight Studio additionally pauses its performance when your battery drops beneath the extent you set.

All of this management is nice, however the HiLight LED array wasn’t designed to remain on constantly for lengthy stretches, so HiLight Studio enhances it with built-in security limits. The developer notes that the LED array’s brightness might be progressively dimmed mechanically if it stays on for greater than 10 seconds at a time. For those who’ve set the LED to activate when an app opens, it should mechanically change off after 30 seconds by default, although you may prolong this to a most of 5 minutes after clicking via a couple of warnings. Notification colours are capped to a minute most.

There’s additionally a worldwide security restrict: the LED is not going to stay energetic for greater than 5 minutes inside any 10-minute interval, no matter your configuration. At any time when any of those security precautions are triggered, the app additionally informs you about it.

Whereas the app is vibe-coded with AI, it has been examined extensively on the developer’s Pixel 11 Professional XL. The developer additionally assures us that the app will stay open-source, ad-free, and subscription-free.

The right way to arrange and use HiLight Studio in your Pixel 11 Professional/Professional XL/Professional Fold to manage HiLight

You may download HiLight Studio from GitHub and set up it in your Pixel 11 Professional, Pixel 11 Professional XL, or Pixel 11 Professional Fold like every sideloadable APK. Nevertheless, you’ll want Shizuku to activate the app’s core performance after each reboot:

• Set up Shizuku from the Play Retailer.
• Open Shizuku and begin it by way of Wi-fi debugging. Shizuku will stroll you thru the pairing course of.
• As soon as Shizuku is put in, open HiLight Studio > Setup > Request entry, then permit entry when Shizuku prompts you for it.

Upon getting the core performance arrange, it’s important to grant HiLight Studio “Notification entry” while you need notification guidelines, and “Utilization entry” while you desire a rule to run whereas an app is open. The app’s Setup tab guides you thru all of this. There’s an ADB-driven setup too, however we couldn’t get the command to work on our finish.

My colleague Adamya Sharma tried out HiLight Studio on her Pixel 11 Professional XL. For her, putting in the app was most likely the trickiest a part of the entire expertise. The ADB methodology didn’t work for her, and getting Shizuku arrange and granting it the required permissions took some effort. She additionally needed to navigate Android’s Play Shield warnings and different restrictions earlier than she might really get the app operating.

As soon as she bought previous all of that, although, the app labored fairly effectively for what it guarantees. You get six totally different results — Rainbow, Random, Comet, Pulse, Breathe, and Wave — and you may assign totally different colours to particular person apps. One of many coolest options is the flexibility to create your individual shade presets for the LEDs.

You may even customise every LED shade individually, so you may choose as much as 10 totally different colours and regulate their saturation, depth, and brightness to create your individual patterns.

You may as well arrange guidelines for particular person apps and determine precisely how HiLight ought to react while you obtain notifications from them. By default, HiLight turns off after 30 seconds, however you may prolong that to 5 minutes with a toggle. There are additionally choices to maintain it disabled at sure instances, which is especially helpful when you don’t need your telephone lighting up in the course of the night time.

Total, she discovered the app to be fairly cool. It’s the type of characteristic that makes you surprise why Google didn’t provide one thing like this itself. Maybe there are technical causes for protecting tighter management over the LEDs, resembling issues about their longevity, however HiLight reveals simply how far more flexibility Google might have provided from the beginning. That’s one thing a whole lot of customers have been sad about.

There may be one fairly massive caveat along with her expertise, although. After putting in and utilizing HiLight, the bottom characteristic stopped working correctly on her telephone. She was now not seeing the LEDs gentle up when speaking to Gemini or when receiving calls from my favourite contacts, two conditions the place HiLight is definitely imagined to work.

She deleted the app and restarted her Pixel 11 Professional XL, and the whole lot went again to regular. So whereas the app does a fairly good job of unlocking extra management over the LEDs, in her case, it additionally appeared to intrude with a few of the system’s built-in HiLight performance. For now, she’ll be sticking with Google’s implementation.