Android phones could be due for a pre-Android 14 treat in the form of an updated Assistant At a Glance widget design, according to developer findings.
If you're not already familiar with At a Glance, it's a Pixel-specific widget that pulls information from your calendar, emails, the Weather app and more to give you a quick way of checking what's going on in the world from your home screen or always-on display.
The new version of the widget debuted with the Google Pixel 6 series, and has since appeared on newer models like the Google Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 7a.
Meanwhile on other Android phones, you can get the previous version of this widget via the Google app as the Assistant At a Glance widget. It looks rather-old-fashioned compared to what the Pixels get, and doesn't pull in data from other apps as effectively, but fortunately Google's apparently been working on updating it.
The new look
The refreshed design was apparently first spotted by Nail Saykov, but we can see more in a new screen capture from AssembleDebug. The new version of the widget does much the same job as the old widget, but now it's arranged in a pill that takes up to two lines of your home screen (the Pixel's only requires one) and always displays the weather in a little bubble. Hopefully it'll be better at floating timely information from your other apps too, something that the demonstration's amusingly-titled test event seems to show.
New Google at a glance widget. I know it's known. But just showing how this is gonna work. All we have seen till now is just screenshots. 🙊 pic.twitter.com/rMoInKLBXhAugust 1, 2023
In true Material You style, the widget appears to adjust its colors to match your phone's wallpaper, including transitions to Light Mode or Dark Mode when needed. Plus, you're able to select solid, transparent or outline designs for the pill depending on what looks best to you.
There's no sign of a specific release date for the updated Assistant At a Glance widget, but it looks close to done in AssembleDebug's screen recording, so hopefully we'll get an official announcement from Google in the near future.
Android 14, the next big update to Android, is slated for stable launch this fall, and could feasibly include this as part of its big list of changes. Considering it's tied only to the Google app though, it also feels possible that Google will introduce the new widget design as part of a standard app update whenever it's happy with the rework.
