I bought a Pixel 11 Pro XL for the ring of LEDs around the rear camera bar. Google shipped the phone with a tiny fraction of what the hardware can do. An open-source app called HiLight Studio fixes that, free, in five minutes, and works on day one.
I want to walk through what the app unlocks, who should bother installing it, and where the catch sits.
Why a phone needs a third-party app for its own LEDs
The Pixel 11 Pro XL has eight small LEDs surrounding the rear camera bar. Each one is independently addressable at full RGB, meaning millions of possible colors per LED. Google shipped software that uses roughly two percent of that capability. Hands-free Gemini sessions light the array up. Favorite contacts trigger a pulsing effect. Five colors are user-configurable. That is the entire feature set.
If you have ever held the phone in your hand and wondered if a deeper menu was hidden somewhere, the answer is no. There is no per-app control. There is no pattern editor. There is no way to set a custom color for new messages from one specific contact. Google has not added any of that since the phone launched.
A single developer, tech YouTuber Dhananjay Bhosale, built the missing piece. The app is open source, free, sideload-only (sideloading means installing apps outside the official Play Store, usually from an APK file you download yourself), and lives on GitHub.
What the app actually controls
After install, HiLight Studio exposes three layers of control the stock software hides.
Per-app color rules are the headline feature. You pair any installed app with a color, then decide whether the array should fire on a new notification, while the app is in the foreground, or both. I tied WhatsApp to a warm orange and watched the back of the phone finally feel like a notification light. That single rule is the entire reason to install the app.
Six animated patterns come baked in: comet, pulse, breathe, wave, rainbow, and random. Each pattern can be layered on top of a per-app rule, or used as the default when no rule matches. A slow breathe pattern is what I run at low brightness; rainbow mode is what you turn on when you want to be the loudest phone in the coffee shop.
Per-LED editing is the deep end. You can pick a distinct color for each of the eight LEDs in any preset, with up to ten colors total. Saturation and brightness sliders sit beside the picker. Saved presets export to a portable file, which means moving to a new phone is a ninety-second restore instead of rebuilding rules by hand.
A handful of details that earned real estate in my setup:
- Battery cost is invisible at moderate brightness on typical per-app rules. Only the rainbow pattern at full brightness moves the needle.
- The presets file is portable across phones. I wiped my device, restored the file, and had every rule back in under two minutes.
- Patterns stack on top of per-app base colors. A WhatsApp notification can be orange, with the comet pattern running across the LEDs as it fires.
- The app adapts its own UI to system dark mode. Not load-bearing, but it is the kind of polish that suggests the developer is paying attention.
Five minutes from install to working rules
The setup flow is short and there are no surprises.
- Download the latest APK from the open-source release on the developer’s GitHub.
- Install it and grant notification access when prompted. The app will not work without that permission.
- Open the app, pick one app to start with (WhatsApp and Messages are good first choices), and assign a color.
- Pick a trigger. Notification is the default. App-open and both are also available.
- Send yourself a test message and verify the LEDs fire the way you want.
After the first successful test, expect to spend ten or fifteen more minutes building rules for the rest of your high-traffic apps. The whole flow feels closer to configuring an email filter than installing a new piece of software.
The catches worth naming
Three things should be on your radar before installing.
The project is maintained by one person. Updates depend on his time and motivation. If he stops working on it, the app does not get new features and may eventually break when Google changes Android. There is no corporate backup.
Notification access is a sensitive permission. The technical capability is broader than the app uses; an app with this permission can in principle read the contents of your notifications. HiLight Studio is open source and the code is reviewable, so you can verify what it actually does. You should know what you are granting either way.
Google can lock down the low-level LED interface in a future Android release. The HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer, the piece of Android that lets apps talk to physical LEDs) sits behind an internal API. If Google tightens that API in a security update or a version bump, the app can stop working overnight. There is no fallback path.
None of these are dealbreakers for me. They are the trade-offs you accept when a third-party app is filling a gap the manufacturer should have closed from day one. If you want a vendor-supported equivalent, you will be waiting for Google to ship per-app LED controls, which has not happened on any Pixel to date.
Who should not bother
Three groups can skip the install without missing much.
Anyone who keeps their phone face-down and relies on vibration for alerts. The LED array does nothing for that workflow, and HiLight Studio does not change it. Anyone who is satisfied with the five-color default. The stock behavior is not broken, just limited. If you are fine with limited, the app is a fun toy rather than an upgrade. Anyone on a Pixel other than the 11 Pro or Pro XL. The app installs on older Pixels but does nothing, because the LED hardware is not present. On non-Pixel Android phones, there is no LED array for the app to control.
For everyone else, this is one of the rare cases where a third-party app does what the manufacturer should have done on launch day. The setup cost is trivial, and the payoff is finally getting real use out of a hardware feature that has been dormant for months.
How I use it day to day
Three months in, my setup has settled into something simple. WhatsApp is warm orange on notification. Messages is light blue on notification. The dialer is bright green on incoming calls, regardless of favorite contact status. Everything else is silent except for a slow breathing pattern that runs at low brightness whenever the screen is off.
Six rules plus one default pattern. The phone feels quieter than it did with Google’s stock behavior, but every important alert still registers visually. I have not missed a notification since I set this up.
If you want to start smaller than I did, install the app and set exactly one rule: WhatsApp or Messages in any color you like. That single rule will tell you whether the LED array is worth more of your time, and it takes about ninety seconds.
Trade-offs
HiLight Studio is not free in risk. You are depending on a single developer to keep the app working as Google updates Android. If the developer moves on, the app stops getting updates, and a future Android release may break it. Notification access is a sensitive permission, and even though the app is open source, you are trusting that the code you reviewed matches the code running on your phone.
In our case, I installed it on launch day and have not uninstalled it. The per-app rules are the single most useful Pixel 11 feature for me, and the risk of an open-source app going stale is small compared to the upside of finally having a working notification light.
The migration took about five minutes. The easier-than-expected part was that notification access is a single prompt and nothing else requires deep settings. The harder-than-expected part was resisting the temptation to assign a unique color to every app; I now keep about six rules active and the rest of the phone is silent.
Bottom line
If you own a Pixel 11 Pro or Pro XL, install HiLight Studio this week. The hardware has been sitting there unused since launch day, and the software Google shipped treats it like a Gemini gimmick. A single rule, applied to WhatsApp or Messages, is all it takes to make the array worth owning.
If you only do one thing from this article, install HiLight Studio and pair WhatsApp or Messages with any color you like. That single rule is the entire reason this app exists.