Zac Kew-Denniss / Android Authority
Home screen widgets have been a part of Android since the very beginning and the first T-Mobile G1 in 2008. And for a long time, widgets were one of the first answers when you asked an avid user about ‘Android why wouldn’t he use an iPhone. They were high on my personal list of reasons to use Android back in the day. Times have changed since 2008, and so has Android, and what was once one of Android’s greatest strengths now seems like an afterthought.
Apple added widgets to iOS in 2020 with iOS 14, and it’s impressive how quickly they’ve been adopted by users and developers. Almost every app on my iPhone has a useful, high-quality widget that I enjoy using, which is something I can’t say about my Android phone these days.
But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us when Google, the mastermind and commander of all things Android, seems to put more effort into its app widgets on iPhone than its own operating system. I’d call that a problem, wouldn’t you?
Google’s Android widgets don’t have a consistent design
Let me start with something simple. Above you see two iOS home screens that use Google’s app widgets. The first thing that stands out here is their consistent design. They follow the same design rules and have matching shapes. If I try to reproduce these same configurations on Android, the problem will become immediately obvious.
Where to start with Google’s Android widgets? For starters, the only YouTube Music widget that can fit into a 2×2 grid is the Platinum, which is probably Google’s ugliest widget, although there are many other contenders for that crown. The spacing on the calendar widget is totally wrong; the add button is too big, the month seems isolated at the top left and the decision to put a circle around the date makes the whole thing look like a random collection of shapes. The worst offender, however, is the Google Drive widget. The gap between the search bar and recent files almost seems like an accident rather than an intentional design choice.
Google apps on iOS offer consistently designed widgets that fit nicely next to each other on my home screen. Not on Android, though.
The second set of widgets presents a whole host of problems. Why does the Google Drive widget become a circle when you set it to a 3×2 or 2×2 grid size? Of course, you can’t have an iOS widget that small, but I wouldn’t accept any widget at all in the face of this incomprehensible abomination. The Google Maps nearby traffic widget doesn’t look too bad on Android, but the one I want to use doesn’t exist: Google Maps on iOS also has a widget that can be assigned to a frequently traveled route and provide important traffic information in real time, which is not available on Android at all.
Beyond design, Google’s iOS widgets are more useful than their Android counterparts. Many of these can be configured by the user to display different information. The Google Drive widget has a “Show suggested files” toggle. When enabled, the widget displays recently downloaded files like its Android counterpart. Turn this off and these files will be replaced with more useful download and camera shortcuts, in my opinion.
Between the design inconsistencies, missing widget types like the traffic widget, and user-configurable options, I prefer Google’s widgets on iOS. They may not be perfect or “fun,” but I value functionality over great designs. If you like the different shapes that Android widgets offer, you’ll be as unimpressed with Google’s iOS widgets as I am with their Android counterparts.
What should Android widgets look like?
Do I really want Google’s Android widgets to match iPhone ones? Even though I prefer a more consistent design, that doesn’t mean I want Google to impose strict design rules on everyone like Apple does. What I want is more customizable options and clearer direction from Google. I was trying to imagine what it would look like, and then along came Samsung’s One UI 7 beta, which perfectly illustrates a balance of options and cohesive design.
Samsung’s proprietary widgets in One UI 7 have many options that govern their function and design. As can be seen above, you can choose between six different background shapes for many widgets such as weather, time and calendar, then change the opacity and color of the background. plan.
I’m not surprised that Samsung is the one making the biggest push when it comes to widgets before Google. The company focused on them in One UI 5, redesigning all of its own widgets and adding widget stacks, a feature I think all Android phones should have. One UI 7 took this solid foundation and built upon it. So, what kind of home screens can you create with Samsung’s new widgets?
Play with the widget shapes and icon themes available in Samsung’s theme park and you can create fun home screens. I admit that I’ve never been the most imaginative when it comes to themes, even when I was an active member of the custom launcher communities on Google+. The first screenshot is what I found after playing with icons and widgets, while the second image is the everyday setup I tend to use.
Again, these aren’t perfect. I like them a lot, but maybe the available shapes aren’t original enough for fans of Google widgets. However, they illustrate my point. It’s better to have options like this rather than locking a user into one of two extremes. Worse yet, at least one team at Google seems to understand this, as the clock app lets you choose between multiple shapes and transparencies for its widgets.
Widget Stacks is a feature that would keep me from upgrading to a Pixel phone.
What I like most about Samsung widgets is Widget Stacks. It’s a copy of a similar iOS feature, but it doesn’t matter who came up with the idea first, because it’s something I couldn’t let go of at this point. Being able to scroll through widgets without leaving my main home screen has become part of how I use my phone every day.
Unfortunately, I’m not surprised to find that Google is lagging behind in developing the features it pioneered. Remember when the Pixel Launcher let you change the shape of your icons? As a fan of Samsung’s Squircles, I loved this feature, but in its infinite wisdom, Google removed it in Android 12. Google also had a hidden menu in Android that allowed you to change your phone’s UI , such as hiding certain status bar icons. Once again, it removed the System UI Tuner from Android.
These two features have something in common – Samsung brought them back to its phones via Good Lock – and I still use them. Theme Park supports adaptive icon shape and icon packs, and QuickStar lets you choose which system icons you want to see in the status bar.
In short, Google is no stranger to helping build great features and leaving Samsung and other OEMs to pick up the pieces. Android will continue to have consistency issues compared to iOS until Google understands that it needs to lead by example when it comes to widget design. But hey, at least we get lots of new AI features! What could go wrong by focusing on this instead of paying attention to the fundamental elements of the operating system?
Am I completely out of line? Do you like Google’s widgets on Android the way they are? Let me know in the comments.
