With the addition of song lookup last month, Circle to Search was visually tweaked, and has now lost its Google Lens shortcut.
Up until today, the field at the bottom of Circle to Search matched the Google bar with a ‘G’ logo that opened the Google app, voice search, and Google Lens. You could also tap to perform a text query. That’s followed by the music note icon for song search and then translation.
Google has now removed the Lens shortcut if you wanted to do a live visual search. This is a regression as you no longer have two-step access to Lens wherever you are on your phone.
Old vs. new
On Pixel phones, there’s the Google Lens shortcut in the bottom-right corner of the homescreen, but other default launchers don’t have that. Workarounds include placing the Google Search widget or downloading the standalone Google Lens app icon.
If this isn’t a bug, Google might have made this change to make the Circle to Search UI less cluttered. Going from four side-by-side buttons to just three at the right does visually help. However, the loss of universal access to Google Lens on Android is pretty unfortunate.
This change looks to be widely rolled out across the stable and beta versions of the Google app after a server-side update this morning.
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