If you spent the past week looking at videos and images of the Pixel 2 phones and wishing you could have them in your hands, well today you can have your first taste at them. We got the APK file for the updated Pixel Launcher that will ship on the Pixel 2 with its bottom Google Search bar and At A Glance widget, and it should work on all devices from Android 5.0 Lollipop and upward.

If you install the updated launcher on your device, you'll get those same changes: bottom Google Search bar, top At A Glance widget, and it seems like the animations have been changed a little too. The Google Search bar stays on all the screens but the At A Glance widget will only show on the first screen. The latter will display the weather only if you have location turned on, otherwise there's no way to manually set it to one specific location.

UPDATE: 2017/10/13 3:21am PDT BY

One user has reported a different look of the Search bar in the app drawer along with a modified search interface. Here are the screenshots. Thanks +Rohit "Insert Meme Here" Davenport!

From my tests, the At A Glance widget seems a little finicky and only shows events in the upcoming half hour or so. It also seems to only displays events from your calendar and not from shared calendars: I can't get it to show any shared calendar events, but I'm not sure if it's just me. That would be a bit of a wasted opportunity for me, as most of my events are either shared with the Android Police staff or with my husband.

Update: It seems like this was an issue on my phone. At A Glance should show any event that's in your Calendar app, regardless of whether it's in your personal calendar or shared ones. Artem tested it and it works for him (#ritasluck). If he stops a calendar (personal or shared) from syncing in the Calendar app, the event disappears from At A Glance, if he turns it back on, it reappears. So all is well there. 

For now, At A Glance is the only new addition in the Settings of the launcher. Sadly, it only has 2 toggles: calendar events and traffic information. When Cody uncovered this in his teardown of the Google app 7.9, there was a third toggle for flight info. Google though says that more data should be surfaced through this widget in the future, so hopefully it'll be populated with more relevant info later.

The rest of the settings and features appear to be pretty much unchanged. There was a question mark around the removal of the icon shape setting dialog, but it's still there.

If you want to try the new Pixel Launcher on your device - regardless of whether it's a Pixel, Nexus, or other OEM-made phone - you can grab the APK file from APK Mirror: Pixel Launcher P-4275643. But remember that you'll need to install it as a system app on non-Pixel devices to get the Google Feed on the leftmost screen.

Source: APK Mirror