Google’s redesign of theAt a Glancewidget for non-Pixel phones has been a love-or-hate affair, and I fall into the former camp. I think it looks great, but I have one criticism: the regular Google Search widget looks mismatched and awful by comparison. You’d imagine the Search widget would be one of the most used widgets on Android, so the fact it’s gone this long without a Material You makeover boggles my mind. Google Drive, Chrome, Gmail, Keep, and more have all received new widgets, but this one hasn’t. So I took matters into my own hands with the help of KWGT.
There are a lot of steps to this, but they’re all relatively straightforward. Note that copying the exact dimensions I use for my widget may not give you the intended result, as display size and resolution are factors. Follow the instructions and adjust things so that they look right for your phone.
Now, we’ll add our icons. I’m using the generic ones from KWGT itself, but you may download custom icons easily enough.Iconfinderhas Google’s icons, which you can download in any color or transparency before use. If you’re using KWGT’s icons, follow these steps:
If you want to use a custom icon, go toIconfinderand find the icon you’d like. Then, download the icon as a PNG. Now, we’ll place that in our widget:
Repeat these steps to place both a text search and a voice search icon.
Next, we need to configure our touch inputs. In my case, I want to be able to perform a text search and trigger Google Assistant. For Assistant, you need to download the dedicated app to make setting it up easier.
With all that done, you should have a fully functional search widget matching the new At a Glance design. Once again, a different display size and resolution will change the scaling, so fine-tune things yourself to ensure everything is correct. While this setup is easy to replicate (and if you have KWGT Pro, we evenhave a template for you as a starting point), I hope Google will redesign the official widget soon as there are some downsides to this solution. KWGT can’t automatically change its colors when you change yourMaterial Youtheme, you’ll need to do that yourself. Scaling also gets messed up if you rotate your home screen to landscape. Still, it’s a great stopgap until Google gets it together.
