Joe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR Pixel Launcher’s At a Glance widget may soon be upgraded for better text visibility.
Google appears to be testing a new high-contrast background for the widget to enhance the readability of the text.
Besides the home screen, these changes also show up on the lock screen.
Google’s At a Glance widget for Pixel phones provides useful information, including weather updates, calendar events, upcoming flights, and even your fitness data, directly on your home screen. While it’s already handy, Google is testing new upgrades to present the information more effectively.
At a Glance is part of the Pixel Launcher and is available exclusively on Pixel devices. It is notably different from the eponymous widget, which can be applied to non-Pixel Android phones. The standard Android version lets you choose among solid, transparent, and semi-transparent backgrounds. With the solid and semi-transparent modes, the background color is either white or gray, depending on whether you’re using a light theme or a dark theme.
However, these options are not available for Pixel phones, and Google may address this issue with an upcoming update. You may soon see additional options that enable a high-contrast setting to enhance visibility, based on your phone’s wallpaper.
Google appears to be testing this new high-contrast background option for the At a Glance. Besides adding a background, this option is expected to tweak the text colors, regardless of the device’s theme, to make elements more legible.
At a Glance: Current look At a Glance: High-contrast look
We discovered this upcoming option in the latest Android System Intelligence system app for the Pixel 10. However, we expect older models to receive it too, i.e., when it rolls out. The feature isn’t widely available, and we were able to activate it with some internal tweaking.
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Besides adding a dark gray overlay to improve visibility on a light-colored wallpaper, we also discovered that it loads a light-colored background over a completely white wallpaper, so the outline is ever so slightly visible. The light-colored version also uses black text instead of white to ensure readability.
Besides the home screen, we can also see these changes reflected on the At a Glance widget on the lock screen. This change could complement Google’s recent At a Glance update for Pixel phones, which shows sports-related updates directly on your phone’s home or lock screens.
⚠️ 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.
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