Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Android 16’s first major update made me fall back in love with Quick Settings. After Android 12 took away the smaller toggles and switched to the large pill-shaped buttons in the name of Material You, I started using Quick Settings less and less. See, any time a button is hidden away from my eyes and requires more than one or two swipes or taps, I just forget it exists. And this is what happened for me with Quick Settings on Android 12 to 15; I set up the ones I used the most up front and forgot about the rest.
Android 16 QPR1 brought the ability to collapse each large pill into half its size and thus fit more toggles on one screen, and that’s what I immediately did. I now had more space to try new things with Quick Settings, like launch apps or start actions inside apps, but I blanked out for a while, not finding the right way to use the extra space. That is, until I realized that the action I needed the most is to control my smart home in general, and my standing desk in particular.
What do you use Android 16's Quick Settings toggles for? 6 votes Toggling phone settings (Wi-Fi, dark mode, hotspot...) 83 % Launching apps and Google menus (Files, Alarm, Wallet, TV remote...) 0 % Third-party app actions (Amazon search, Asana task...) 0 % Many/all of the above. 0 % Something else (tell us in the comments) 0 % I don't use Android's Quick Settings toggles. 17 %
Where Google Home failed me, Home Assistant won
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
My first thought went to Google Home. The app provides a lot of ways to access it on Android, one of which is a Quick Settings tile that opens a screen with my favorite devices. That shortcut never clicked for me, though, because it was similar to having the app icon on my home screen; I still had to wait for it to open a menu and then control my devices. Plus, now that I had more space in Quick Settings with Android 16, I wished there were a way to add separate tiles for the devices I need most, not just one shortcut to all of my Home favorites, but that’s not a feature Google Home offers.
Enter Home Assistant, the open-source, really complicated but extremely powerful smart home platform that I adopted earlier this year. While tinkering with my Pixel’s Quick Settings a few weeks ago, I realized there were 12 fully customizable tiles from the Home Assistant app available to add — precisely what I wanted but couldn’t get from the Google Home app.
Google Home offers many ways to launch your favorites panel, but few ways to quickly control each device separately.
Basically, I had 12 blank buttons that would let me run any scene or any automation, or toggle any device in my home. What I needed manual controls for first was my Ikea Idasen desk because it doesn’t come with preset heights and has an absolutely horrific default Bluetooth app. Even though I’d already added it to my Home Assistant setup to replace that app, I couldn’t automate it because I don’t have a precise sit-stand schedule, so I had to dig into the app to control it each time. Easy toggles would make the process as frictionless as possible and help me switch my desk more often.
... continue reading