I am using a widget -filled phone homescreen since the release of Samsung One UI7, and this is the longest stent with widget that I have ever done. But whenever I go all-in on widgets, their downsides essentially start coming to the surface.
Whenever you return to your homescreen, you usually see the same set of app icons and folders with your wallpaper. They are usually the same and are easy to load. Widgets are different. They are special.
Each widget is functionally a miniature application. A calendar widget has to pull its current program. If it tries to save time by showing yesterday’s schedule, it is not working.
A budget widget needs to show how much money you still have, not two hours ago when you went wild on a steam sale. A music player widget can not only show you the song that is currently playing, but also your accurate position in the track.
This means that many widows have to load it again when you see them every time. The more widget you add, the more widget you have to load.
The irony is that the widget that already takes the longest time on my phone is also not the one who changes dynamically. Rather, this is a single stable picture of my wife. After the initial load, it appears immediately for a long time. But at some point later in the day, or when I switch to the cover display covered by the internal performance of my Samsung Galaxy Z fold 6, I can expect to wait a few seconds to popp again for the widget.
It makes the devices feel dull
Android handles it much better because it is used (or our mobile processors are just very fast as they used to be), so this problem is not as much as it was once. In fact, most of the widows I try to use do not take time to load. The thing is, it only takes a slow widget, yet every time you return to your homescreen, feel like a drag using a phone.
Modern phones are incredibly powerful machines. My foldable easily improves the fanless laptop that I used as my light work partner. That computer took a break to open about any of my favorite Linux app. My phone, meanwhile, can also launch the most demand for mobile apps and games immediately.
So it begins to especially panic when a homescreen widget becomes one of some things on my phone that I need to wait to load. Not a port of steam game. Not a photo gallery full of thousands of memories. Not a streaming app to watch the latest episode iron HeartA widget.
I’ll be honest. I used to live with it for some time without thinking. Eventually, I was very using these widows. I liked some of my favorite notes directly accessible from my home screen. I liked that I could see my calendar and my budget right next to each other. I loved to see the assignment of my work quickly without the need to pull the app. I was very comfortable to allow widgets to manage my digital life more.
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I never liked the homescreen widget – now they run my life
I feed without my widget.
Then I re-established Niagra Launcher, Mere Go-Two App Launcher before embracing Samsung’s One UI. The difference in speed was night and day. I could return to my launcher, swipe through an app drawer, and open my budget app at that time whenever the widgets were waiting for the witnesses to wait for the load to initially. And when a launcher opens an app, regardless of its position in the alphabet, it is easier to actually lose their primary appeal than my right thumb, compared to a horizontal sweep between homescreen pages, actually sweeping horizontally between the homescreen pages. They are not really saving me or more accessible.
The fact is that some widows take a few seconds to load, Samsung and a UI7 are not the fault. This is not really the fault of Google and Android. As I mentioned earlier, most of my widgets were lodged faster than powering on the phone, as much as I could notice. I appreciate the work that Google and Samsung have done here.
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This individual app is up to developers to ensure that their widgets quickly loaded. And quite clearly, many app developers consider widgets to be later. Some ships perform a widget ship that remains unchanged for half a decade, even they improve the app. Nevertheless, it seems difficult to complain about developers when many people do not send a widget at all.
While I appreciate Samsung’s first-party widgets, it is not enough for me to do it completely here without a third-party widget, and they remain the weakest links.
Fortunately, the reason for hope. Some phone manufacturers are showing renewed interest in widgets that they ship, and Google is taking steps to encourage app developers to create high quality widgets. But at the end of the day, I suspect that if a screen full of widget will ever feel without any one.
