Google's march feature drop breaks now playing app for third-party scrobblers

Google recently rolled out the March feature drop for eligible Pixel devices, bringing a slew of upgrades, including a revamped Now Playing app. However, this change has inadvertently broken the app's functionality for third-party scrobblers, leaving many users frustrated.

Now playing no longer notifies scrobblers

The Now Playing app, once a built-in service, is now a dedicated app that identifies the songs playing around you. While the app itself still works as intended, its History section, which contains a list of previously recognized tunes, is no longer accessible to third-party tools that rely on the Now Playing system notifications to curate a list of identified songs.

Scrobblers like Pano Scrobbler, which monitor the Now Playing system notification to sync recognized songs to platforms like Last.fm, are now rendered useless due to this change. The notification functionality that these tools rely on has been suppressed entirely in the March feature drop.

Some users, like Reddit user birbeck1, speculate that Google intentionally made this change to break compatibility with third-party scrobblers. However, developer Kieron Quinn disagrees, pointing out an unused flag – NowPlaying__enable_notification_and_settings_redirect – in the Now Playing app's codebase. Quinn believes this flag's existence suggests Google could restore notification functionality in the future, making tools like Pano Scrobbler functional again.

In the meantime, users are left with no option but to wait for Google to potentially address the issue. Interestingly, a Redditor mentions that Simplescrobbler can still export songs to Last.fm after the March feature drop, but without personal experience or knowledge of Simplescrobbler, it's not recommended as a viable alternative.

Given the importance of Now Playing as a major Pixel feature and the number of users who rely on it with third-party scrobblers, it's likely that Google will fix the broken functionality in the near future.