• Mention of a 'Pixel Glow' feature has been found in an Android 17 beta
• This feature would seemingly use colored lights on the back of the phone to alert you to notifications
• It would likely require dedicated hardware, so might be a Pixel 11 feature

It’s getting ever harder for phones to differentiate themselves from one another, but Google might have come up with a way to help the Pixel 11 series stand out from at least most of the competition.

Its secret weapon might be something called ‘Pixel Glow’, which Android Authority has found mention of while digging around in the latest Android 17 beta. The site found a screen — which you can see below — detailing that Pixel Glow uses “subtle light and color on the back of your device to inform you of important activity when it’s face down.”

So, it sounds like this feature would use dedicated colored lights to alert you to notifications, and reading between the lines, it might be possible for different colors or patterns to notify you of different things, so you can tell what kind of notification your phone has received without picking it up.

You can already use the ‘Flash notifications’ feature to have the camera’s flash alert you when you have a notification, but Pixel Glow sounds like it will be more advanced than that.

Strings of code found by Android Authority also suggest this feature will work with Gemini in some way, and note that “the device must have hardware lights," which presumably counts out existing Pixel phones.

A Nothing Phone rival?

But exactly how light-filled the back of Pixel 11 models might be, or how capable these lights will be, remains to be seen. We doubt Google will go full gaming phone and match the number of RGB lights featured on those, but Pixel Glow might perhaps have some similarities to the Glyph lighting system found on most Nothing phones.

Regardless, it certainly sounds different from anything found on phones from mainstream rivals like Samsung and Apple, and early reactions to the idea seem mostly positive, with people over on Reddit saying things like “RIP Nothing Phone” and “This is cool”.

Still, how cool Pixel Glow will actually be remains to be seen, but it certainly leaves us intrigued.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.