The At a Glance widget on Google Pixel phones has been the bane of my existence for too long. It's not that it's terrible, but it hasn't been removed yet, and there seems to be little reason to use it at all.
Android authority discovered that in the latest Canary (beta) version of the Google Pixel launcher, there's a new toggle in the At a Glance settings menu labeled “Show on Home Screen”, suggesting you'll finally be able to turn off the persistent widget. The publication says that for now the switch is not even working, but hopefully by the end of 2025 it can finally be turned off.
The Quick Look app may be amazing, but in practice it mostly only shows the date and weather, which makes it incredibly boring. Google even tried to fix this a few years ago when it launched Material You along with a range of fun and exciting widget designs. However, attempting to use them on the main desktop was often blocked by the At a Glance feature and often displayed the same information, making the fun widgets sadly unnecessary. You'd think that a widget as smart as At a Glance would be able to adapt to other widgets on your screen, but that's not the case, so overlapping information is usually inevitable.
It honestly showcases a lot of Google's shortcomings in one small widget. This is an outdated design that many may think the company has forgotten about. This is not true as Google has quietly added more features to it over the years. However, at the end of the day, not being able to turn it off and replace it with another widget undermines the spirit of Google's human-centered, customizable design.
Another thing that drives me crazy is that it adapts to display new information beyond the date and weather, but then hides that new information behind a flip to a semi-hidden second page. I would say that if he wants to say something new, he should show it right away. The date and weather are shown 90 percent of the time, so anyone who's ever glanced at their phone has likely seen it within the last hour. Please show me other information more often!!! Otherwise, adapting the widget every time I look at my phone seems pretty pointless.
What's even more frustrating is that it can also just show something like a calendar event on that hidden second page, which usually appears as a notification or some other kind of alert, so by the time I see it in the At a Glance, I've already seen it on the lock screen or in the notification shade. The same goes for extreme weather warnings.
The pink settings are for the old At a Glance option, and the white settings are for the new design.
You material was presented in 2021.and new design The At a Glance widget follows in subsequent years. It looks great and matches the style of modern Pixel phones perfectly. However, I'd venture a guess that no Pixel owners actually use it, since then they'd have to deal with two At a Glance widgets on the home screen. However, to top it all off there's almost no point: the prettier At a Glance widget doesn't have the same capabilities as the original text widget, but it does seem to be more effective at displaying alerts for things like the calendar. At the end of the day, it just seems crazy to me that Google has a better version of this widget but you can't use it.
Overall, this shows how Google's attention to detail can erode over time as internal teams often tend to lose sight of their own projects. Like, I seriously have no idea how the second At a Glance widget was approved and shipped, knowing that it couldn't replace the regular version without using a third party launcher. Let's hope Google is finally on the way to fixing this situation, because people have been complaining about this only since 2019.
Source: Android Authority
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