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Google Home could soon make its home screen widget more useful and less frustrating (APK teardown)
- The Google Home app could soon add a refresh button and the “last refreshed” time to its home screen widget.
- The home screen widget could also get a “suggested” entry, which would add your most used items and automation to the widget when it is set up.
The Google Home app recently received a major update that brought much-anticipated features like a home screen widget, making life easier for smart homeowners. We did complain that the app still needs a lot of work, and thankfully, Google has been working on improving the overall experience. An upcoming update to the Google Home app will bring a new refresh button for the widget and give you suggestions on the devices you should add to it.
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An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
The Google Home widget is very handy on your home screen, saving you from opening the app for frequent toggles. However, the widget itself doesn’t constantly refresh and display an updated state of your smart home (Google says it refreshes every 30 minutes), so some users have resorted to forcing a refresh by toggling a random device.
Google could make this easier with a dedicated refresh button that will also show the time of the last refresh. We managed to activate the new widget UI with the refresh button in Google Home v3.24.1.4, and you can see the button in the image below:
This should make it easier for people to determine when the information displayed on the widget is out-of-date and needs a refresh. They wouldn’t have to toggle random devices to force a widget refresh.
Further, when adding a widget to the home screen, Google Home could soon have a new “Suggested” option. This widget will automatically add your most used devices and automation to the widget. Since we didn’t have automations set up on the account we enabled this on, we are only able to see an “Add favorites” button when we activated this feature, as you can see below.
The suggested options will be handy for people who haven’t set up their favorite devices yet, removing a barrier to onboarding for the widget and driving up its adoption.
Both of these changes are still a work in progress. Google hasn’t mentioned these upcoming features, but we hope to see them roll out very soon.