HiLight Studio Brings Real Customization to the Pixel 11 Pro Notification LED

A third-party app called HiLight Studio gives Pixel 11 Pro owners detailed control over the phone's HiLight notification LED, a feature that ships with only a handful of preset behaviors from Google. The app was developed by Dhananjay Bhosale, known on X as Dhananjay_Tech, and is available as an open-source project on GitHub (The Verge).

HiLight is Google's modern take on the classic Android notification LED, a small light embedded in the Pixel 11 Pro's camera bar. It has been described as the biggest hardware change on the Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL (Android Police; Engadget via Facebook). Out of the box, the LED glows only when the phone is lying face down and you are interacting with Gemini, or when receiving a call from a favorited contact. Users are limited to five colors and cannot adjust timing, brightness, or saturation (The Verge). Google's own Pixel 11 settings do add a Battery option under Notifications that activates the LED for charging and full-charge states, but that is the extent of first-party customization (Computerworld). Google also supports color-coding favorite contacts so users can tell at a glance whether to pick up the phone (YouTube).

HiLight Studio addresses those limitations directly. Users can choose from eight preselected colors or use a classic color slider for full chromatic control. Beyond color selection, the app exposes per-cycle timing, brightness, intensity, and saturation adjustments. Presets can be imported and exported, letting users share configurations with others (The Verge).

The GitHub repository describes HiLight Studio as an experimental Pixel 11 HiLight LED controller targeting Android 17. It supports the Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel 11 Pro XL, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold (GitHub). The app is not on the Play Store; installation requires sideloading the APK from the repository (The Verge).

The gap HiLight Studio fills is not subtle. Google shipped a hardware feature with software constraints that kept it close to a novelty. Five colors, two trigger conditions, and no user-tunable parameters make the LED functional but barely personal. For a feature positioned as a flagship hardware differentiator, that is a narrow surface area.

What HiLight Studio does is turn a read-only indicator into a programmable output. Per-cycle timing and intensity controls mean the LED can convey meaning beyond color alone. A fast pulse at low brightness for a messaging app, a slow steady glow at full saturation for a calendar reminder. The preset import/export feature adds a community dimension, letting users distribute and adopt configurations the way they share Tasker profiles or custom watch faces.

The trade-off is the sideload requirement. Without Play Store distribution, HiLight Studio sits outside Google's security review pipeline. Users installing it are trusting a single developer with access to a hardware subsystem. For an audience accustomed to sideloading development tools, that calculus is familiar, but it does narrow the app's reach to the enthusiast tier.

There is also the question of longevity. HiLight Studio hooks into a hardware feature controlled by Google's system stack. Android updates can change internal APIs without notice, and an experimental app with no Play Store presence has no automatic update mechanism or formal support channel. Users adopting it now should expect some maintenance overhead.

The broader context here is a familiar pattern in Android's ecosystem. A hardware vendor ships a capable component with conservative software defaults, and the developer community extends it past the vendor's original intent. The notification LED itself is a callback to an earlier Android era, when small multicolor LEDs on phone bezels provided at-a-glance status information. OEMs largely abandoned the feature during the bezel-shrinking push of the mid-2010s, replacing it with Always-On Display and ambient screen notifications. Google's decision to bring it back as a dedicated hardware element embedded in the camera bar is a design choice that HiLight Studio makes substantially more useful than Google's default implementation suggests.

Whether Google expands HiLight's first-party capabilities in future Pixel feature drops remains an open question. In the meantime, Bhosale's app gives Pixel 11 Pro owners a way to extract more value from hardware they already own.