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Trio of new weather widgets is in the forecast for Google (APK teardown)
- Google has built three new weather widgets for Android, hiding in a recent beta release.
- The new widgets include a smaller space-saving option, as well as two with expanded hourly views.
- Right now there’s no telling when or if any of these three will be going live.
Are you taking full advantage of all the useful widgets available from your apps? Android widgets can be a fantastic way to get the most useful information you need from apps at just a glance, and your favorite software probably offers a bunch of them you’ve never even looked at. While you owe it to yourself to do something about that, eagle-eyed widget fans should be spotting a handful of new additions soon, as Google prepares to introduce three weather widgets.
Google delivers its weather services through the company’s self-titled Android app, and while poking our nose around the new 15.28.37.29 beta release, we’ve manage to uncover work on three additional weather widgets, which we’ll likely see join the pair of existing options.
Right now you can get Google weather on your home screen in the form of either a diagonal 3 × 2 widget showing the current weather, or a wider 4 × 2 widget with the hourly forecast. Both of these are resizable, and while their shape and content varies as you tweak those parameter, you’ll never see them displaying content that quite matches what we get in the new ones. Speaking of those, we can add three more widgets that Google’s been preparing: a square 2 × 2, a day-at-a-glance hourly 4 × 2, and an expanded 4 × 3 that incorporates a forecast for the next few days.
Admittedly, the distinctions between some of these and the older ones can be subtle — especially the 4 × 2 options — but the new entries squeeze in more data, while still avoiding becoming overwhelming.
While we’re able to manually activate these three widgets in the Google app beta, we should caution that just because they look nearly ready to go doesn’t mean that Google’s rushing to get these out the door. The company could very well continue to tweak one or more of them, delay their introduction indefinitely, or just reconsider its plans entirely. Maybe we’ll even get some additional options, like a week-at-a-time extended forecast.
For now, we’ll be keeping an eye out for any new widgets going live in future releases. Are you looking forward to running any of these on your own home screen?