Want to get your hands on Google Now but not willing to wait for Jelly Bean to make its way over to your Android device? If you happen to have Ice Cream Sandwich, it is actually possible to get Google Now thanks to a newly discovered method by febycv, a user on the XDA Developers Forums. For those who haven’t been following the news about Jelly Bean, one of its most interesting changes is the addition of a new Google Search service which will actually gather information based on your normal patterns and trends, way before you ask it to. The program is called Google Now and in some ways it is a lot like Apple’s SIRI assistant, though many of its pre-fetching and searching components help set it apart from what iOS has to offer.

So what’s involved in getting Google Now to run on ICS? First, your device must already be rooted for this to work. If you have a rooted system, its just a matter of carefully following these instructions:

1. Open Root Explorer and navigate to /system.
2. Open build.prop in a Text Editor.
3. Edit ro.build.version.sdk=16 and Save.
4. Go to /system/app and rename GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk to GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk1
5. After that, you need to reboot your system.
6. After rebooting, you must download the app. Go ahead and install it.
7. Go back into build.prop and change ro.build.version.sdk = 15
8. Restart one last time and everything should be working.

According to various reports out there on the net, some devices seem to work better with Google Now running on ICS than others. You may experience search issues, voice issues or other bugs that wouldn’t be there with a proper Jelly Bean installation. Just be careful, any time you are modifying files like this in the root, things can go wrong, especially if you throw caution to the wind and don’t properly follow instructions.

Have you tried the hack? If so, what do you think of Google Now on your ICS device?

[ source ]