Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
TL;DR Google Clock 8.2 appears to fix some of the rendering issues users saw with the app’s Expressive redesign.
Google’s working on a slightly tweaked workflow for alarm creation, making date options more prominent.
Alarms that fail to go off as scheduled should start displaying a slightly more helpful error notification.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest things in the world that end up causing our most unexpected headaches. Google’s Clock app is about as straightforward as they come: it tells the time, lets you set alarms, and can run a stopwatch or a timer. What could possibly go wrong? Well, a recent update addressed our lack of imagination there, as users found the time rendered in unexpected ways, impairing visibility. Thankfully, it looks like some fixes are already arriving.
When Clock started getting its Material 3 Expressive overhaul last month, users were quick to spot some edge cases where screen elements no longer quite fit where intended, with text and numerals spilling off the side of the screen or wrapping in unwanted ways. Google said that it had figured out what was going wrong here, and reassured users that a fix was on the way.
Looking at the new version 8.2 release of Google Clock, we’ve spotted some updated screen layouts that appear to be in response to these problems — and specifically, with the stopwatch. We weren’t seeing the unwanted behavior ourselves even before this update, so we can’t confirm definitively that this is the fix, but it sure has all the hallmarks of one.
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That will most likely address some of the more egregious rendering issues we observed, but the app is also beholden to your font-size and screen density settings, so if things are still looking wonky for you, feel free to dial those down in Android system settings.
While that fix alone is reason for Google to update Clock, we’ve also spotted a few other changes happening here, some already available and a few of the more work-in-progress variety. In the former column, we’re seeing new options for the app’s world clock. There, we’re getting some interface changes for moving cities around or removing them from your list — nothing we couldn’t do before, but just now with a nice, accessible menu instead of doing it all by dragging.
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