Phones won't support lock screen widgets in Android 15, but here's what it'd look like anyways

The upcoming Android 15 update won’t have a ton of new features for tablets, but that’s because some of the bigger changes are still hidden. Take lock screen widgets as an example: even though the feature is nearly fully functional, it won’t be part of the first stable release of Android 15 that’s set to roll out very soon. When it eventually does roll out, though, it’ll unfortunately be limited to tablets. But what would it look like if Google didn’t limit lock screen widget support to tablets? We activated the feature on a Pixel phone running Android 15 to find out.

In case you missed it, earlier today we published a closer look at lock screen widgets in Android 15 that reveals the current status of this feature. Compared to when we first showed it off in April, there’s now a better visual hint at where to swipe to surface the glanceable hub, there’s no longer visual overlap between lock screen UI elements and widgets, and there’s no longer any obstructions preventing widgets from being interacted with. While we admittedly didn’t spend much time with the feature, it was obviously much further along than when we last took a look at it, leading us to believe it could make an appearance in an upcoming quarterly platform release of Android 15 at the earliest.

However, our belief that lock screen widget support will be limited to Android tablets running Android 15 still hasn’t changed. Sadly, there’s no evidence to suggest that Google intends for this feature to land on phones. Despite that, we were curious what, if anything, would prevent lock screen widgets from working on phones running Android 15.

After all, apart from the obvious screen size difference, there’s no reason why phones can’t technically show Android widgets on the lock screen. Under the hood, Pixel phones and tablets running Android 15 use the same shared codebase, so it’s not like Pixel phones are missing some critical bit of code that implements lock screen widget support.

Furthermore, lock screen widgets aren’t shown alongside other lock screen UI elements like the clock, shortcuts, or notifications; instead they’re shown on their own dedicated page called the glanceable hub that’s accessed by swiping inward from the right edge. This, theoretically, means that phones should have enough screen space to show widgets; after all, the glanceable hub is basically just a home screen page where nothing but widgets are shown.

With a bit of tinkering, we managed to find an answer to this question. While there are some obvious issues, namely with rearranging widgets, Android 15’s existing lock screen widgets implementation works surprisingly well on phones. In fact, it almost seems as if Google is actually attempting to optimize this experience for phones. Widgets are shown two at a time on screen directly above the fingerprint icon, for example. Take a look at the following video to see what I mean.

While I have no evidence to suggest this is the case, I hope that Google is indeed considering bringing lock screen widgets to phones. The feature obviously makes a lot of sense on tablets, which is why I suspect this feature might arrive along with the Pixel Tablet 2 release, but I’m sure some people will want to place widgets on their phones’ lock screens too. After all, some people like to use minimalist home screen launchers, so having a dedicated space for widgets on the lock screen that’s out of sight by default would let them use widgets without messing up their home screens. It’s clear that Google already wants to make the lock screen more optimized on phones, so adding widget support would be the cherry on top.