Widgets used to be one of the coolest features on Android, and if your favourite app didn’t support widgets, well you might’ve been quite upset. In 2019, most people simply don’t care. Lockscreen widgets basically don’t exist anymore, and while they’re still used on home screens, they’re not as prevalent as they once were.
Personally, I use a few widgets – an agenda widget, one for Ausdroid’s analytics, and one for Authy for easy access to 2FA codes. I don’t, however, use the Gmail widget .. and this is why I didn’t immediately notice this change.
According to Android Police, this change to Gmail was made back in March, but no one noticed.
In short, very little has changed. The big red background on the header is gone, replaced with a red font on white. The font is also smaller. The design is overall more clean – that’s what Material Design is all about, after all – but otherwise the widget is the widget. It still does the same things and is, for most people, probably still fairly useless.
If you do use the Gmail widget, and you haven’t got the update yet (you most certainly should’ve by now), you can check for the latest update on the Play Store.
Widgets is one of the things that keeps me with Android; I use Calendar and Keep widgets for quick and easy reference, a weather one and a Play Music one. If anything I wish there was better, more robust usage of them across the board.
Spooky. The same name and, almost, the same use of widgets!
Agree that while I don’t use widgets as much as I used to, they are one of the things that I could not do without. I hate that my work iPhone doesn’t have them.
Screenshots or it didn’t happen.
Seriously though, I feel this article would benefit from some imagery.
The header image is the new widget layout….