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I’ve been using a phone homescreen filled with widgets since the release of Samsung One UI 7, and it’s the longest stint with widgets I’ve ever done. But whenever I go all-in on widgets, their downsides inevitably start to surface.
Some Widgets Take Too Long to Load
Whenever you return back to your homescreen, you typically see the same set of app icons and folders, along with your wallpaper. These typically stay the same and are easy to load up. Widgets are different. They’re special.
Each widget is functionally a miniaturized application. A calendar widget has to pull up your current schedule. If it attempts to save time by showing yesterday’s schedule, it isn’t doing it’s job.
A budgeting widget needs to show how much money you have available right now, not two hours ago before you went wild on a Steam sale. A music player widget might not only show you the song that’s currently playing, but even your exact position in the track.
All of this means that many widgets have to reload each time you see them. The more widgets you add, the more widgets you have to load.
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Ironically, the widget that takes the longest time to already on my phone isn’t even one that dynamically changes. Rather, it’s a single static picture of my wife. After the initial load, it tends to appear instantly for quite a while. But at some point later in the day, or when I switch from the inner display of my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 to the cover display, I can expect to wait a few seconds for the widget to pop in again.
This Makes Devices Feel Sluggish
Android handles this much better than it used to (or our mobile processors are simply much faster than they used to be), so this problem isn’t as grating as it once was. In fact, most of the widgets I try to use don’t appear to take time to load at all. The thing is, it only takes one slow widget still buffering every time you return to your homescreen to make using a phone feel like a drag.
Modern phones are incredibly powerful machines. My foldable easily outperforms the fanless laptop that I used to use as my lightweight work companion. That computer took a pause to open up just about any of my favorite Linux apps. My phone, meanwhile, can instantly launch even the most demanding of mobile apps and games.
So it starts to feel particularly jarring when a homescreen widget becomes one of the few things on my phone that I need to wait to load. Not a port of a Steam game. Not a photo gallery filled with thousands of memories. Not a streaming app to watch the latest episode of Ironheart. A widget.
Widget-Free Launchers Feel So Much Faster
I’ll be honest. I lived with this for a while without thinking much of it. After all, I was getting great use out of these widgets. I liked that some of my favorite notes were accessible directly from my home screen. I liked that I could see my calendar and my budget right next to each other. I liked being able to quickly see my work assignments without needing to pull up the app. I was getting quite comfortable allowing widgets to manage more of my digital life.
Then I reinstalled Niagara Launcher, my go-to app launcher before I embraced Samsung’s One UI. The difference in speed was night and day. I could return to my launcher, swipe through an app drawer, and open my budget app in the time it sometimes took waiting for widgets to initially load. And when a launcher makes opening any app, regardless of its position in the alphabet, actually easier to do with my right thumb than sweeping horizontally between homescreen pages, widgets start to lose their primary appeal. They’re not actually saving me time or being more accessible.
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Improving Widgets Is Up to App Developers
The fact that a few widgets take a few seconds to load is not the fault of Samsung and One UI 7. It isn’t even really the fault of Google and Android. As I mentioned before, most of my widgets loaded faster than I could notice, aside from powering on the phone. I commend the work Google and Samsung have done here.
It’s up to individual app developers to ensure that their widgets load quickly. And quite frankly, many app developers treat widgets as an afterthought. Some ship a widget that has remained unchanged for half a decade, even as they improve the app itself. Yet it feels hard to complain about those developers when many don’t ship a widget at all.
While I appreciate Samsung’s first-party widgets, there aren’t enough here for me to do without third-party widgets entirely, and those remain the weakest link.
Fortunately, there’s reason for hope. Some phone makers are showing renewed interest in the widgets they ship, and Google is taking steps to encourage app developers to create higher-quality widgets. But at the end of the day, I’m skeptical if a screen filled with widgets will ever feel as fast as one without.
