Summary
- Google Keep’s updated widget now follows Material You guidelines, with a cleaner design and new shape options.
- The new widget utilizes homescreen space better, with larger flower-style options and more rounded buttons.
- The update only affects the quick-capture widget for Google Keep.
Google Keep, potentially one of the most beloved of Google’s suite of apps, has been getting some much-needed attention lately. Proof of this can be found with the new Google Keep widget rolling out today.
Related
The refreshed Android widget brings a cleaner design and better use of homescreen space (via 9to5Google). This update focuses entirely on the app’s Quick Capture widget, but at least it now conforms to Android’s Material You guidelines.
Technically, the update only affects a single widget, but because of how
Android
widgets work, it behaves differently depending on how you resize it. At 2×1 or smaller, it becomes a single shortcut button. Resize it to 2×2 and it morphs into a larger flower-style widget that highlights note types.
Google also updated the 3×1 widget to make the layout larger and easier to tap. It does fit better within Android’s current styling language, even if it looks somewhat bulbous.
The updated layout now spans the full width of the homescreen grid instead of just hitting the left and right edges. The buttons are now more rounded-square shaped and there’s a more uniform look to the widgets. The old “new note” shortcut used a pill-shaped design.
I played with the new widgets on my
Redmagic 10 Pro
phone, and I noticed the flower-shaped widget kept cutting off at the edges no matter how I resized it. The widgets themselves look bigger and seem to take up more screen real estate. You can see the difference between the widgets in the photos above. The old widgets are on the left, and the new ones are on the right.
One widget, many shapes
Google hasn’t made any changes to the Note collection or single note widgets. They already stretched edge-to-edge. The quick capture update brings Keep in line with similar widget redesigns in other apps, like Google Drive, which received the same treatment.
The redesigned widget is rolling out as part of a server-side update, so the changes won’t appear with just an app update. Google Keep version 5.25.14x is rolling out now, so reinstalling the
widget on your homescreen
may help trigger the new look.
