Google now lets you poke the Digital Wellbeing widget when it’s being unresponsive

It has a dedicated refresh button now

Widgets are a great way to access critical functions of an app right from your home screen. Options like Google’s At a Glance widget let you glean important information like weather, your next meeting, and AQI alerts conveniently. Almost all these widgets update automatically in the background without being asked, so you get current information at all times — at least, they’re supposed to. But now we’re seeing Google’s Digital Wellbeing widget introduce a refresh button for when it needs a little reminder to keep things current.

The Digital Wellbeing widget shows you how much time you spent staring at your phone’s screen. It also has a neat graphic detailing the top three apps responsible for that screen time count. The widget supports Material You dynamic theming and respects dark mode settings. Sometimes, though, members of the Android Police team have noticed that the widget isn’t great at keeping up with device status changes — just like toggling dark mode.

Google has updated the widget with a new refresh button in the upper-right corner. If widgets are supposed to update automatically, why is Google even doing this? Although some users may not have had problems with widget behavior here, this sure feels like some degree of tacit acknowledgment for issues like the ones we’ve mentioned seeing. Of course, that forces us to ask the question of why Google’s not fixing any underlying issues with auto-refresh, and leaning on this manual work-around, but one thing at a time.

If you haven’t yet, consider adding Digital Wellbeing with all the other best Android widgets you’ve got on your phone. If you take a moment to set it up correctly, it can help cut down on distractions and break you free of doomscrolling tendencies, plus it has handy features like app timers to slash your screen time. Digital Wellbeing also tells you how many times you opened an app and how many notifications disturbed you. We don’t mind having the refresh button in its widget, but we just can’t fully wrap our heads around why Google added it at all.

Thanks: Eduardo