Android 15 lock screen widgets: Here's a better look at this upcoming feature!

The stable release of Android 15 is right around the corner, but one of the features that’ll be missing from the initial version is lock screen widget support. That’s right: Google is preparing to bring back an Android feature it killed off nearly a decade ago. In our initial hands-on with lock screen widgets in Android 15, we mentioned that the feature was quite buggy. It’s been a couple of months, though, so we decided to revisit the feature to see how it’s evolved. While there are still some kinks left for Google to iron out, the Android 15 lock screen widgets feature looks significantly more refined than when we last showed it off in April.

To recap, we first reported back in January that Google was looking to bring your Android widgets back to the lock screen. At the time, we didn’t know if this capability would be available for all Android devices or only on Android tablets. With the release of Android 15 Beta 1 in April, though, we not only got our first look at this in-development feature but also confirmation that Android 15 will only support lock screen widgets on tablets.

When we activated the lock screen widgets feature back in Beta 1, we noted that it was accessible by swiping inward from the right edge of the lock screen. Doing this surfaces the “glanceable hub,” a page dedicated to showing widgets. On the glanceable hub, you can add, remove, or rearrange widgets to your liking. Once you’re done choosing your widgets, you can swipe back and forth between the lock screen and the glanceable hub, all without unlocking your tablet.

This basic flow hasn’t changed since Beta 1 was released in April. However, after the release of Beta 1, Google fixed two of the major issues with the initial implementation. The first major issue was that certain lock screen UI elements, like the clock, were overlaid on top of the widgets page, visually obstructing some of your widgets. The second issue was that the widgets couldn’t be interacted with, meaning they were only useful if they showed relevant information at a glance. Both of these issues were fixed when we revisited the feature in June’s Beta 3 release, as shown in the video embedded below.

As you can see in the video, there’s now a long, vertical pill on the right edge that’s similar in size and color to the navigation pill. This serves as a visual indicator that you can swipe inward on the right edge. Swiping inward reveals that the lock screen and glanceable hub no longer visually overlap. By default, the only button that appears on the glanceable hub is a button to change the current profile; the button to customize the glanceable hub is only shown when you long press on an empty space.

Up to six widgets can be shown on a single page at a time, though since the glanceable hub is horizontally scrollable, you can add more widgets than that. You still can’t resize widgets, unfortunately, but you can interact with them. In the video, I tapped on the play button in one of YouTube Music’s widgets, which caused a podcast to start playing. After swiping to the lock screen and back to the glanceable hub, a large media player widget appeared at the very left of the widgets carousel. This media player widget is a larger version of the media player shown in the notifications panel, and it only appears when a media session is active or has recently been active.

There are still some issues with Android 15’s lock screen widget feature, even in the latest Beta 4 release, but it looks significantly more ready for release than when we last saw it in April. We don’t know when exactly Google plans to release this feature, but I’d wager it’ll come with the release of the upcoming Pixel Tablet 2. It could potentially even come to the existing Pixel Tablet even earlier in a quarterly platform release of Android 15, though again, we don’t know Google’s timeline.