Unlocking Convenience with GOOGLE's Latest Creation: The HOME Favorites Widget

Google wants to do what it can to bring smart home tech to your fingertips. While there’s a growing number of gadgets to make life easier, Google’s app can now help you better interact with them by putting them on your own for easier access. A homescreen widget allows you to set some devices – or individual actions on devices – as a favourite so you can quickly interact with them without having to launch the app.

Peeking Behind the Curtain with APK Insight

Before we dig into the juicy details of ‘Favorites’ widget, however, a quick note on how we know these things. APK Insight is our trade name for the process of taking newly uploaded versions of apps to the Play Store and analysing the decompiled code to reveal back-end development that could be commonly enabled in future releases. It’s important to remember that Google may or may not choose to implement these changes, and features seen in APK Insight may or may not ever ship to users.

The Essence of the Favorites Widget

Image provided by the authorGoogle’s Favorites widget is the latest development in a trend toward putting more people in more control of their smart homes more quickly. Favorites is designed to give users ‘Quick control of your Actions, automations, and devices’ in a familiar but clean, streamlined layout that echoes the existing grid of tiles and the Quick Settings Home Controls shortcut but with a little extra familiar human touch.

Setting Up Your SMART HOME Hub

When you configure the widget once you put it on your Android device, the Google Home app asks whether you want to sync the new widget with your existing Favourites tab, or whether you want to make it a separate entity: It’s a choose-your-own-adventure approach to hardware and software configuration, letting you choose whether you’re controlling a single home or a half dozen apartments.

A Visual and Functional Delight

With a default of 5x3, the Favourites widget should not only stay put on your homescreen but, if its creators are to be believed, can cover the whole thing if you prefer. Dynamic Color theming adds a feeling of delightful coherence as the widget becomes part of your device’s colour scheme.

The Waiting Game

At the time of writing, the tech world is abuzz with the impending availability of this Android widget and its imminent release to smart devices across the globe that will no doubt revolutionise the smart home experience and make it available to even the most tech-shy users.

HOME is Where the Heart (and Tech) Is

Ultimately, the Google Home Favorites widget reminds us that out homes aren’t just buildings made of bricks and mortar. Our homes are becoming fabrics of connected ecosystems that anticipate our needs, feed our desires and make our home life easier and more breezy. Features such as the Favorites widget enable Google to transform our homes into our personal spaces where convenience, comfort and control become the very essence of our 21st-century homes.

But as wait for the arrival of Favorites widget, we should also recall the real-life magic that Google and others are creating with technology. Google might indeed enable smart home-management, but all technology companies are working to make the mundane more magical.