Android has managed to be the most used mobile operating system in Spain, and part of its success lies in some features that it solves better than the iPhone or any of its now-extinct rivals. Widgets are one of those elements that have been with us since Android has been Android, but it seems that in recent years they have lost a bit of a pull, and it is that if years ago we had a widget for almost everything, over time we have become more boring and let’s get down to business.
With the arrival of widgets in iOS 14, 13 years after the launch of the original iPhone, widgets have surprisingly regained a major role. The new widgets are attractive, although in our use it is not that they are proving to be more practical than those of Android. Which Android widgets are currently worth using? I have been asking
Productivity: indisputable
Productivity has been one of the areas in which we have most agreed. Virtually all members who make The Free Android and Omicrono have acknowledged using work-related widgets.
However,What productivity widgets do we consider essential?Let’s do a concrete review of our favorite widgets:
- Calendar:Having a quick view of our most important events is essential, the most important being:
- Google Calendar: The Google Calendar widgets are simple, we have an agenda view and a monthly view.
- Samsung Calendar: This is a personal choice, and stick to the fact that my personal mobile is a Galaxy Note 10+. The view by month shows, not only the events, but the strokes that we make in pencil in the widget itself.
- Email:
- Spark: One of the best apps to come to Android in 2019. Readdle is one of the best development teams to make iPhone apps, and Spark’s arrival on Android couldn’t have been better. A great email application with a widget that shows us the tray we prefer.
- Gmail and Outlook: If you use the native mail clients of Google and Microsoft, their widgets don’t look bad and some other team member uses them.
- Tasks and notes:
- Google Keep: On a personal level I’m not a big fan of Google Keep, and I was surprised to learn that there are people on our team very happy with the application and its widget.
- Google Tasks: The app for jotting down tasks and marking them as completed is sublime. It is a very simple widget, but extremely practical, and the most impressive thing is that even though I use it a lot, I never get to open the application because the widget offers everything I need.
- Samsung Reminder: Samsung’s reminders application is perfectly integrated between the application, mobile widget and Samsung Galaxy watches, being one of the best add-ons to have a mobile phone and a watch under the same brand.
- Calculator: All-In-One-Calculator is a very complete application with micropayments and ads (although if you are subscribed to Google Play Pass, you will have a clean experience without ads) and one of the values that attracts us the most about this application is its widget, which adds a simple calculator in the launcher itself. It also has an app
Basic visualizations
Widgets that normally come in the factory configuration, and that in our case we refuse to remove from our mobile devices, such as:
- Watch: Although seeing the time is not something at all special (and we can see it in the status bar) having a large clock is part of our Android essence, as well as being the perfect shortcut for alarms, stopwatch and countdown.
- Time: Another recurring search in our day to day. These types of widgets are not usually so accurate when recharging every so often, but again it is a visual part that takes us to our weather application. Each manufacturer tends to put a lot of emphasis on their weather applications, thus
- Google search bar:Removing this widget is usually the first thing I do when new mobile, but it seems that a lot of people use this widget a lot. This is why it is extremely accessible on mobiles like Pixels.
Additional features
- Accessories: Some accessories such as the Galaxy Buds + include a widget that allows us to know the status of the battery or access certain modes simply with a touch.
- Mobile data consumption: Although Android has a great system for measuring mobile data consumption, it is not always entirely accurate. If our operator has an application, it will surely have a widget. In my personal case, I use Pepephone’s, which, although it could use a reform
- Iberia: If you travel a lot, the Iberia application offers direct access to your boarding passes and your Iberia Plus card. I imagine that other airlines will also have their widgets, but having flown with Iberia with a certain frequency is the one I use.
The entry These are the Android widgets that we use the most in The Free Android appears first in The Free Android.
