Chrome on Android soon lets you access recent tabs & bookmarks via Android's search feature

Google is working on a new feature to integrate Chrome with Android App Search. That means, you can access recent tabs and bookmarks from Chrome directly through the search feature on Android phones.

This feature, still in development and currently available only in experimental flags, will require a bit of setting tweak in Chrome to be enabled. Once activated, you can find your recent tabs and bookmarks sitting nicely on Android’s search interface, complete with its favicons.

The Mountain View tech giant has been working on this feature for quite some time, but only recently has it shared the progress in a new commit message.

It reveals this functionality as “donate the tabs and bookmarks to Android App Search,” but it remains in the early stages as things stand now, with a full rollout currently unknown.

There are also a few flags in Chrome Canary on Android that hint at it, as seen above. For example, one flag states, “If enabled, allows Chrome to integrate with the Android App Search.” Another mentions showing a notice card for this integration and Chrome can display a notice card on the “magic stack for Android App Search integration.”

And with that, Google will make it happen efficiently by scheduling periodic syncs in the background that index Chrome’s tab and bookmarks, so that the data remains up-to-date. You will also be able to enable or disable the sharing of tabs and bookmarks with Android’s AppSearch.

Android already lets you search for apps, including Chrome. So now, Chrome is “giving back” its tabs and bookmarks to Android search for users to access them. It’s a complex process that Google has been working on for quite some time.

In more recent news, Chrome on Android has also been testing new ways to reorder tab groups. There are also new floating snackbars that push notifications over web content in a non-intrusive way and iOS-like animation for back-and-forward gestures.