Discover the Revolutionary Android Widget that is Taking Animation to the Next Level

When you flip through the screens of your phone, you most likely see each app as a little icon. But some applications let you swap that icon for a widget—a larger image that sometimes lets you access the app without opening it. Widgets add aesthetic appeal to your home screens while also providing some useful features. For example, weather apps can deck out your home screen with the day’s up-to-date temperatures, music players might let you skip songs or hit pause, and memo apps can display prominent notes.

While Apple only recently added widgets to iOS, Android’s still remain far more flexible and versatile, so users can go ahead and make their iPhone-user friends jealous.

Although plenty of weather apps offer Android widgets, 1Weather stands out for its stylish look, detailed readouts, and plethora of customization options. You can specify which information you’ll want to see to fulfill your forecasting needs, and choose from multiple layouts for that data.

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Very few things on your phone are more important than battery life. Keep a close eye on it with this widget, which gives you a more detailed view than the icon in the status bar does. Tap on the widget to open the app, which provides even more information about your battery’s current condition.

If Battery HD doesn’t offer enough customization for your needs, check out Battery Widget Reborn. It also displays extra information about battery levels, but with more options for specifying the size and color of the display image. And it’s not just a pretty picture: This widget also estimates how long your device can last on its current charge, and offers its own power-saving mode to extend your battery life.

If you’re the kind of person that can’t wait for an amazing occasion, let Countdown Days tick away the time for you. The simple and neat app has an accompanying widget available in a variety of colors that updates itself with every passing day.

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Whatever information about your device you want to see on your home screen, Elixir 2 can put it in a widget for you. Customize the display with battery status, available storage, processor and memory load, network connection strength, running apps, integrated sensors, display properties, or any combination of that data.

Evernote is hands-down the best note-taking and project-organizing app on Android or any other platform. Its selection of widgets adds to its appeal: They give you quick access to your existing digital notebooks and allow you to create new ones on the fly.

When you need to remember birthdays, anniversaries, important meetings, public holidays, and other events, the ability to always view your calendar on your home screen can make a huge difference. Google Calendar’s widget lets you do just that, and you can choose between viewing the whole month on the screen, displaying an agenda, or both.

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Google’s simple, but effective, note-taking app comes with a nicely styled widget. It can show you thumbnails of your most recent notes, or—if you categorize your digital reminders—thumbnails of the notes in a specific category. You’ll also get a shortcut for creating new reminders on the fly.

This Google Maps widget is one of the most beautiful widgets out there, and definitely one of the most useful. As soon as you place the widget, it’ll prompt you to enter a single address (your best bet is to choose a frequently-visited one, such as your home). Then, every time you tap the icon, it will pull up instant directions to that pre-programmed location.

Control Spotify from your home screen with this widget’s simple play, pause, and skip buttons. They help you instantly adjust your favorite tunes without having to open the app each time. The widget will also display the title and artist of the current track, along with a small thumbnail of the album art.

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Don’t waste time poking around the Netflix app when you can quickly launch it from your home screen. Depending on the widget size you choose, you can jump back into the show you were just watching, check out any new content that Netflix is promoting, or both.

David Nield is a freelance contributor at Popular Science, producing how to guides and explainers for the DIY section on everything from improving your smartphone photos to boosting the security of your laptop. He doesn't get much spare time, but when he does he spends it watching obscure movies and taking long walks in the countryside.It’s rather hard to change how people use their phones. One recent example was Google wanting to meaningfully change how you interacted with “People and conversations” on Android in large parts through widgets.

Google made “People and conversations” a tentpole of Android 11 back in 2020. It – correctly – identified that “communicating with your friends and colleagues is the most important thing many people do on their phones.”

App Widgets · Gitbook

For end users, this initiative manifested as a dedicated “Conversation” section at the top of the notification shade, with a tap opening that messaging thread in a floating chat head bubble. You were also given the ability to give specific conversations “Priority” and custom sounds or vibrations.

Android 12 continued that focus with the introduction of a “Conversation Widget.” The homescreen object was meant to “promote user interaction by allowing them to easily open chats on the home screen.”

These widgets are enhanced shortcuts that allow users to efficiently get back to their conversations while showing snippets of their conversation status or other relevant information.

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Google imagined this widget displaying everything from upcoming birthdays to what songs friends are listening to and what movies/games they are playing. Another example was location sharing, missed calls, and if they were exercising. The full list of supported “activities” includes:

In practice, the Conversation Widget today mostly just shows the last sent chat (in Google Messages). Other developers did not really use the space for anything, while Google — with the Android 12 Material You redesign — dropped the idea of [

Broad adoption of Google’s vision would have contributed to a meaningfully different way of using your phone. Instead of opening an app, imagine being able to see information directly on your homescreen. (Think Windows Phone Live Tiles but much richer.) That would result in a highly glanceable experience that’s an efficient way to quickly get updates about your most important people. In fact, you might not need to open an app in the first place if all you intended to do was get a status update.

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Additionally, updates on your homescreen would have offered a meaningful alternative to notifications that are less invasive and do not inundate you as you’re in control over who gets a widget. Both Android and iOS have the concept of badges appearing on app icons, but they are just in service of getting you to open an app to get anything done. Design-wise, the Conversation Widget — as any widget — showed you a lot more live info without then having to open an app.

Apps as silos is something I’ve written about previously in the context of Google Now. The metaphor of apps is very simple. You open one to complete an action. However, the express purpose of an app/service is to get you to spend as much time as possible within it. In that sense, it’s isolating from the rest of your phone.

That ingrained model is one reason the Conversation Widget never took off. There isn’t real developer incentive to show information (besides notifications) outside of the app. Another is that Google never really encouraged the apps it controls — Maps for location sharing and activity statuses from YouTube, YouTube Music, Stadia, and Play Games — to adopt the vision to serve as high-profile demos. It would have of course helped if Google had a modern consumer messaging service that wasn’t based on SMS (or even RCS) to implement these social features.

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At the time of Android 11’s developer introduction, Google said the “people and conversations initiative is a multi-year Android initiative that aims to elevate people and conversations in the system surfaces of the phone.” Android 12 saw an advance (widget), while Android 13 saw no new movement.

Hopefully, Google has not concluded the People and conversations initiative. It went under the radar at the time, but it could be revolutionary if there was even some adoption by first-party Google services. Apps would go from walled off experiences to services that natively integrate with Android. It would offer a meaningfully different way to use a smartphone, and that should not be abandoned without another push.

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