A sideloaded Android app called HiLight Studio gives the Pixel 11 Pro‘s rear LED array the control Google refused to ship in the first place. The phone’s new HiLight system, built around a ring of light behind the camera flash, does two things out of the box: it glows during Gemini conversations, and it lights up for calls from favourite contacts, in one of five colours. The HiLight Studio app opens that up to custom colours, animated patterns and per-app notification triggers, once you sideload the APK and grant it permissions.
What HiLight does out of the box
HiLight is a genuine piece of new hardware on the Pixel 11 Pro, not a software reskin of the existing camera flash. Google’s own use of it is narrow: the LED ring lights up when the phone is face down and you’re talking to Gemini, and it can flash for an incoming call, but only from a contact you’ve marked as a favourite.
Even then, it’s limited to one of five preset colours, with no way to assign a colour to a specific app, contact or event. That leaves the ring effectively decorative for most owners, since favourites lists are typically short and few people spend long stretches talking to Gemini. For a feature built around a ring of RGB light, that is a small slice of what the hardware can actually do.
What the HiLight Studio app unlocks
HiLight Studio removes those limits by talking to the LED array directly. It adds animated light patterns, including a moving comet effect, a pulse, and a rainbow cycle, on top of custom notification triggers for individual apps rather than just calls and Gemini.
There are also Quick Settings toggles to turn the light on or off without opening the app, and the developer has built in hardware protection limits so the array can’t be driven outside safe operating parameters. The project is open source, so its permission requests and LED-driving code can be checked before you grant it access. Setup isn’t a Play Store install: you sideload the APK, then grant its core permissions using Shizuku over Wireless debugging, which hands the app system-level access via ADB without requiring root.
Our take: a familiar pattern on this phone
We covered the Pixel 11 Pro’s telephoto sensor picking up a quiet hardware upgrade earlier this week, a case of Google under-selling what the phone’s silicon can already do. HiLight is the same story told in reverse: capable hardware, deliberately capped by software rather than by the sensor or the LED array itself. The phone that quietly got a better camera component also shipped with an RGB light system restricted to two triggers and five colours, and it took a third-party developer, not a Pixel Feature Drop, to open it up. That is a pattern worth watching as Google keeps adding hardware it doesn’t fully switch on at launch.
The specific figures here matter. Out of the box, HiLight is capped at five colours and two triggers, a limit The Verge reports was removed by developer Dhananjay_Tech’s app rather than by any Google update.
What to watch next
Worth watching whether Google widens HiLight’s stock functionality in a future Pixel Feature Drop, since HiLight Studio currently depends on sideloading and Wireless debugging rather than a Play Store listing, which keeps it out of reach for anyone not willing to dig into developer settings.
