UPDATE2: Not everyone has the latest Android version, so we have made few hacks and workarounds on Android 11 and earlier devices to make the Bedtime widget work well in the 1×1 and not too much worse in the default 2×1. Hopefully this will further address some of the issues reported in the discussion below.
Android 11 and earlier:
UPDATE: There has been some controversy about the round widgets now redesigned as rectangles with round corners. This is more in line with the Material V3 widgets takeaways. It allows us to better align the widget with the home screen icons especially in the 1×1 view and at the same time allow the widget to be resizable, make layouts dynamically adjust to the selected size (Android 12+) and use all of the available space efficiently.
Latest version with fixes and improvements based on your feedback is here or in the BETA channel.
The image below demonstrates the alignment problem of the old widgets:
Latest version of Sleep as Android adds redesigned material widgets. They are more useful showing more info and hopefully better looking and aligned with modern home screens. Please let us know what you think in the comments section.
Android 12+
The graph widget is even more useful now showing the different sleep score measures including duration, regularity, depth, efficiency… You can configure the order of shown measures on the Sleep Score card > Sort..
75 thoughts on “Widgets!”
Mine doesn’t look great, when I woke up it was a huge green square with a tiny Android in the corner and on deleting and reinstating it’s now a huge white box, bigger than other icons on the screen.
Hello Jenny, could you please post a screenshot of what you are seeing on the screen to get a better idea? Also see my answer to @jonny above, please. Ideally please send the screenshot to support@urbandroid.org
Honestly not a fan. I enjoyed the circle sleep widget as it looked clean. Now I have a big brown square with a half mood in it as a widget and it looks ugly on my home screen
Hello Jonny, many thanks for your feedback. The problem with 1×1 widgets is you can never align then with the other icons on the home screen as you cannot really know the padding and spacing of the app icons and text, so it is better to design then as boxes and allow users to freely resize them as they wish. We are now using this space with more features and we did make the layouts adaptive so you they look better with different sizes. Anyways we will gather feedback on this and consider some adjustments..
I don’t like “next alarm” widget. Font size stays unnecessarily small when resized to 2×1. Also it would be useful if that widgets could act as on/off toggle. At least it should open Alarms list or that specific alarm. (I really like how Samsung’s one looks and works)
But rest of them looks and works great!
Hello Ondrej, good points, I have revered the feature to open the alarm list due to some bad feedback on this from people who were used to open the main screen from that widget, anyway with the new Bedtime widget which does just that I think it really makes sense to open the alarm list as you say. I will also look into making the text bigger for bigger widget sizes..I think having the toggle directly on the home screen is just too dangerous for missing an alarm, I think it is better to leave it to the next screen. Many thanks for this suggestion!
1 word. Ugly. No feedback needed, self explanatory 🤷
Sorry about that, I hope you will change your opinion of you see this change in a perspective.
Hi, can you please bring back the old alarm widget? It looks WAY better on my phone! And it easily assures me there is infact an alarm set the very next morning, and if not, it specifies the day.
The new one it is hard to see from the small dots which day the alarm is set and if it is tomorrow or the next day, increasing the risk of oversleeping! Please at least make old widget an option in settings.
Also the new one doesn’t even open the app properly and I have to go into the app drawer and open the app itself! I already have alarm screen set as the home screen in the app, so why show this just without access to settings and menu? Makes NO sense to me!
So to be sure not to oversleep because the alarm is set on the wrong day, and being able to quickly open the app (my phone home pages are full) I had to revert back to an older version. Please fix this!
Regards,
Audun
Hello Audun, many thanks for your feedback. In fact the new Alarm widget shows the next day of the alarm in the very same way the old alarm widget did if alarm is for apart then 24 hours (again exactly as the old widget did)..
Do you think you can give users the ability to use both the old and the new widgets? I can see how the new design could appeal, but for certain situations, the old design looks cleaner. Unfortunately this text box doesn’t let me insert pictures, but I like the sleep button and the android guy not being in boxes for some situations! Thanks!
Hello Cynthia, can you please use imgur to share the image or send the image to support@urbandroid.org.. we do not want to keep legacy options as this would bloat the app. Instead if you understand the issue we can fix it, but it should be a real issue, not “I like circles more then round squares”..
I agree with you, I actually thought this was a bug at first!
I’m not sure why others have problems aligning things as you have a grid shown when moving widgets so you do know the spacing and padding? (see https://imgur.com/gallery/CfYtI9t)
Hello Danielle, I do not understand the image you shared with the frame alignment, on my Pixel launcher I do not have anything like this, can you maybe share the whole screen to get a better idea.. in genral we don’t use any additional paddings or margins for the widgets they should occupy the whole available space with a card layout..
I’m also not a fan of the new sleep tracking widget design – it feels obtrusive. I much preferred the circle.
The comment stating that the problem with 1×1 widgets is not being able to align them because you can’t know the padding doesn’t make sense to me as a grid is shown when you try to move/resize widgets? (see https://imgur.com/gallery/CfYtI9t)
I dont understand why you keep redesigning the droid on transparent background. It was perfect, it really didnt need to be turned into a massive colored square.
Ive been using this app for a decade, thats how I remember you tried this once already and people didnt like it. I dont see anyone who was using this in particular being keen on it being turned into this obtrusive form, because its appeal was that it wasn’t another block on your screen.
If this is about readability you had various other options to integrate the text with the droid in a way that it provided a background without the whole widget needing a solid background.
I genuinely appreciate your work on this app, but in this particular point I have to ask: who is this for? Because I dont think its for the people who were using that widget.
Hello, many thanks for your feedback, the trend in Material Design and widgets is clearly in favor of solid bacjground widgets and we want to follow the trend. Also we got a lot of criticism of the old widgets and really wanted to make them in line with how modern widgets look like on Android.
Really not a fan of the new sleep tracking widget, it looks very out of place an obtrusive on my home screen. Surely you could give users the option of the new or old design?
Hello, sorry for the issues, I have uploaded this article with a new screenshot comparing the new and old widgets to show that in fact the old widgets had an issue beeing out of place which was criticized by our users a lot and this is why the new widgets use all the available space more efficiently.
I honestly hate it. I may need to get a different app. I much preferred the old widgets. Even if you want to keep the new widgets it would be nice to keep the option for the old app. I also miss the functionality of when you didn’t have an alarm set it would take you to the list of saved alarms rather than having to create a new alarm. Making new widgets are fine but please keep the old options available for people. I’ve used this app for years but this will make me choose a new one.
Hello Sophie, many thanks for your feedback. I hope the new widgets are really a Material 3 refresh which is much better aligned with the launcher icons on the home screen and allows more customization as all the widgets are now re-sizable and they also dynamycally adjust layouts to the available size. Rearding no alarm taking you to list of alarms we will definitely consider this, if you like to get the BETA version with that functionality, please contact support@urbandroid.org
I liked my little Droid guy on my widget…🥺 I don’t like the new one😒
Hello Michelle, we still show the little droid guy on the Bedtime widget what do you do not like about the new widget? Also the new bedtime widget become more useful by showing also the next alarm time and day, showing a no alarm indicator and even bedtime when no alarm is scheduled..
Where can I find information about what the widget tells me?
Have a 1×1 with the alarm time, a set of dots (they’ve been mostly grey with 1 yellow but today the yellow changed to red) and the clock.
What are the dots & colors?
Hello Jon, many thanks for your feedback… you can see there are 7 dots on your alarm widget.. and the color indicates the day the alarm is scheduled for from red – monday to green satursday.. this corresponds to the color coding of the old widget..
Why can’t I choose to have a transparent background?
Hello Jonn, the main problem is alignment with the rest of the launcher icons on your home screen as demonstrated in the new screenshot at the top of this article. Also we want to make the widgets resizable with support for many different formats and I do not see a way how to do it without using a card background for the widgets..
Why can’t I choose a transparent background?
The new widgets are, unfortunately, a massive downgrade for me.
I’ve used the premium app for 10 years, and I’ve lost the one widget I always used since it was simple, clean, and did not interfere with the rest of my home screen. This was the “android getting ready for bed” widget, which was clean, did not have a background, and matched well with my other app icons.
The new 1×1 widget is frankly ugly, too large, and looks bad no matter how I use it.
Hopefully, I can downgrade back to the old version.
Many thanks for your opinion, I think I have replied to this in my other responses on this thread and and the alignment issue with transparent widgets is shown in the UPDATE to this article..
Why not include both? What’s the downside in doing so?
It doesn’t match any of the widgets I have on my phone anymore, and looks out of place.
More options are better than no options.
The new Droid Guy widget takes up a 1×2 space, and has a large, solid background. This makes it more cluttered and larger than the previous one. Please bring back the old, transparent background one.
No. I want it to be like it was yesterday, with just the solitary android guy. It was nice and clean, it looked good on my screen, and I could control the size. I had zero issues with the appearance. That has been my preferred widget for years and I’d like to have that option back. This new block takes up too much space. My personal screen top doesn’t need to fit with widget trends. Like a lot of other people are saying, just give the old appearance back as a user option, don’t try to force us to like what you all think we should like because it’s what’s trending.
The 7-dot feature of the new widget is clever.
It would be nice if the font size for the next alarm time was a bit bigger. It’s readable, but when I’m tired and wanting to double check when my next alarm is, I could see myself having a harder time parsing it.
Hello Lindsey, great to have also some positive feedback on the widgets for a change! :).. The alarm text gets bigger in a 2×1 view, but keeps small in 1×1 to fit on all screen DPIs.. but I think I can tryt o make it one step bigger and hopefully it won’t break on some really small screen sizes.. please expect this change in the next version.. I will also release an updated APK including the change to go to alarm list on case on alarm is scheduled here: https://sleep.urbandroid.org/more/download/ and in the BETA channel..Many thanks!
Hello Jenny, we don’t see such behavior, can you please share a screenshot ideally with support@urbandroid.org? Many thanks Petr
Hi Petr,
I have to second the opinion of previous users. I’d like to have the simple small circle back as a user option. Your answer to all these comments is, that the old widget was unable to place correctly, but, obviously, none of the users (including me) have a problem with it. E.g. I’ve had the widget on place where no other icon was nearby so I didn’t notice any inconsistencies the whole time.
IMHO if half of the users have problem with the old widget and half of the users have problem with the new widget, why not to provide both? Is there any technical limitation?
Anyway, thank you for all your work for us.
Hello Stepan, I think this is typical information bias, in fact minimum people have issues with the new widgets, but negative feedback so much more likely to be send then positive feedback that it looks like there is a major issue, but the app has 1 million of active users and if this would be a real problem we be flooded but a magnitude more of negative feedback as we did see in the past for other changes. We try to listen to the feedback here carefully and already did make more than 10 different changes in the follow up versions of the app. I strongly believe we have addressed the real issues and the rest is just that people were used to something and now it is different like the guy who goes to the supermarket for bread every day and suddenly they move the bakery to a different part of the shop..
I, for once, am finding the widgets useful and good looming now, but I never used the old ones, so that could be the reason.
Thank you for being them up to the current android styles.
Hello Gustavi, exactly as you say I could not use the old widgets as they had a lot of alignment issues. I’m now using all the new widgets in some for, but I guess I’m biased 🙂
I know just what Michelle means, Petr. I liked it better with just the solitary android guy. It was nice and clean, it looked good on my screen, and I could control the size. I had zero issues with the appearance. That has been my preferred widget for years and I’d like to have that option back. This new block takes up too much space. My personal screen top doesn’t need to fit with widget trends. Like a lot of other people are saying, just give the old appearance back as a user option, don’t try to force us to like what you all think we should like because it’s what’s trending.
I just HATE the fact a simple change can’t be done like if it’s asking way too much. The REM sleep color on the graph is grey, it gets confusing and it rather looks like it didn’t record. Why not make it orange color or whatever color you can put but the ones already in use. I mean come on, make the experience easy and enjoyable not just a headache 🤦🤷
Hello Visnu, can you please send us more details, ideally send a screenshot on the support@urbandroid.org we are using the same colors on the widget like we use on the graphs in the app..