These Material You widgets were first discovered back in November
Google Contacts is one of the more basic apps available for your favorite Android phone, but one that no phone can ship without. There have been a handful of visual changes made to the app in the past couple of years as Google set out to establish UI consistency across its apps. Toward this end, we came across new 3×2 widgets for the Contacts app back in November as an under-development feature. Google is beginning the wider rollout of the revamped widgets, which includes new 2×2 and 4×1 widgets for your home screen.
Among the new additions is an Individual Contact widget, which is available in a 2×2 format by default, but can be customized in a few ways, including in a 3×1 vertical bar format that displays the contact’s name, followed by icons for texting and calling. When you have multiple numbers saved, the widget will show a pop-up prompting you to select which to message or call, with the option to save your preference indefinitely. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can specify a preferred messaging service if you don’t use Google Messages with the contact in question.
We spotted this new widget with version 4.5.24.517943267 of the app, which can be sideloaded from APKMirror.
9to5Google also managed to find a 4×1 Favorite Contacts widget that places starred contacts on the home screen. Users are given a choice between displaying starred contacts saved on the device or their Google account. Contacts without an image get the initial of their name in its place, as the screenshot below illustrates. The 4×1 Favorite Contacts isn’t widely rolling out for everyone, 9to5 says, which we can confirm. But it should appear widely for all users over the next few weeks.
This could be one of the many changes coming to Google’s apps preparing the big Android 14 launch this fall. Ahead of the software’s release later this year, we’ve been treated to nuggets of information about some of the visual additions included with the update, including an improved live wallpaper experience as well as a new scalable Android volume slider to replace the existing option, which has a tendency to look awkward on larger screens.
