Fuck Google

Sorry for the potty mouth, but as it is my own blog I feel ok using such strong language to express my frustration with the latest thing broken by design on a software update, and is something I have been saying 10s or 100s of times a day when I use my recently upgraded phone…

Android 15 came out for my Pixel 7a quite a while ago but I did not install it for fear of it breaking the integration with my Pebble Watch and while I always install security updates right when they become available, I do not like major upgrades because tech companies always love to change and move things around just because they think they are smarter than everyone else and know what’s best.

Well this time it did not break my Pebble integration, but because Google knows best they expropriated the long Home press to launch “Circle Search”. That is fine I understand the bread and butter of Google is knowing everything about us to make their search business more lucrative, but what is not fine is not allowing a customization of what a long Home press does like was previously possible.

I had a long Home press mapped to an app called FAST that is a quick app launcher. This allows me to quickly launch any app and is really a convenient time saver.

But now every time I do a long home press out of years of training it does nothing and I remember and say “Fuck Google”.

For now the two workarounds I am testing:

  • Power Button: Settings -> System -> Gestures -> Press & hold power button
    • problem here is that every night when i go to turn off my phone it launches Fast and does not ask me to turn off the phone and I say “Fuck Google” and have to open the phone, pull down the screen, hit the power button, and then say turn off.
  • Quick Tap: Settings -> System -> Gestures -> Quick Tap to start actions
    • just found this this morning and testing with it. Probably will stick with this

And a quick search verifies I am not the only one upset with this change:

Update 14/08/2025
My Pixel 7a’s battery blew out (literally began bulging so much it popped open the case) and when I went to request a repair I saw that they had known issues with the battery on the 7a and checked my serial number and it was confirmed it was affected. There were three options: $200 to buy new phone, $300 credit to buy new Pixel, or have it repaired and send them the bill. I opted for the $300 which converted to 360€ (thanks Trump for dumping the value of the almighty dollar!) and allowed me to buy a new Pixel 9a for a very reasonable 149€ that arrived yesterday!
Of course one of the first things I checked when I went to setup the new device was if there was any option to modify a long Home press to something other than “Circle Search”. But alas no, still no option to change. So I checked Google Issue 33939510 and see that the issue was closed on Jul 9, 2025 03:44PM with this comment:

Status: Won’t Fix (Obsolete)
Thank you for your feedback. We are closing this request as won’t fix obsolete. If this request is still relevant in a current Android build, we request you to log a new request and reference this request for context.

yea. That is unfortunate.

So I spent a bit of time seeing if anyone since then has found another work around and this led me to testing with a couple automation applications:

  • Tasker: oh this appears you could take over the world with this app if you spend the time to figure it out (might have to circle back at some point)
  • Macrodroid: seems super easy and I was able to configure a swipe to launch FAST, but then all other gestures stopped working and kinda freaked me out so I deleted it.
  • Automation: an open source app that might have worked by creating a trigger to detect that Google Circle Search has been launched and having an action to launch FAST but when trying to use that trigger a notice pops up saying “Because of Google’s ininite wisdom, the last Android version this is known to work is 7” (yea, I am not the only one saying fuck google all the time)

so for now I still have no way to easily launch FAST.

Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).