Android widgets gone wild

Every now and then, I stumble onto an Android enhancement so cool, so clever, so frickin’ useful that I just can’t help but smile.

Today, my fellow Android-appreciating aardvark, is one of those days.

This latest revelation stems from the launch of a new connected-device control widget Google announced last month and then started making available to the masses last week, as we discussed in my Android Intelligence newsletter on Friday. But while that widget’s arrival sparked this thinking in my warped and water-logged mammal-noggin, it’s a setup you could apply just as easily to any Android widget you find yourself interacting with regularly.

I won’t keep you waiting: The trick of which we speak is a way to create a floating, on-demand widget that you can then summon with a simple long-press of one of your phone’s physical volume buttons. And good golly, is it one of the smartest and most sensible productivity upgrades you’ll give yourself all year.

It’s also surprisingly easy to accomplish — once you know how to do it.

And, suffice it to say, it’s yet another one of those bits of advanced efficiency-enhancing magic that’d only be possible on Android.

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The wonderful floating Android widget

Before we dive into the specific steps, let me give you a closer look at exactly how this wild widget wonder works.

Right now, from anywhere on my Pixel 8 Pro phone, I can press and hold the volume-up key on the side of the device for about a second — aaaaaand, boom:

JR Raphael, IDG

That aforementioned connected-device control widget pops up for instant access, no matter what app I’ve got open or what else I’m doing on my device.

I’ve set up a similar mechanism for my two-factor authentication widget, via Authy, only connected to my device’s volume-down button in that instance. Whenever I press and hold that key for a sec, my Authy widget pops up for easy on-demand access to copying any code I need for signing into a site or service — without interrupting what I’m doing or forcing me to futz my way back to my home screen and waste endless seconds first.

You can use this same setup to make any widget available in an on-demand, floating form with the press of your phone’s physical buttons. And it should work on any Android device, too, no matter who made it or what Android version it’s running.

Ready for your custom efficiency upgrade?

How to unleash any Android widget

All right — to make this Android widget sorcery happen, we need two separate ingredients.

It may sound like a lot, but stick with me. It shouldn’t take you more than five minutes max to set this up, and the two tools involved are some of my absolute favorite Android power-user tools and apps that are well worth having around even beyond this specific purpose.

1️⃣ First, we need to create your floating widget. For that, we need an excellent app called Popup Widget. It’ll set you back two bucks to download.

Once you’ve got Popup Widget on your phone:

• Open it up and tap the plus icon in the app’s lower-right corner.
• Find and select the widget you want from the list that pops up.
• And that’s it: You can ignore everything else there, which should be fine in its default state, and simply hit the left-facing arrow in the upper-left corner of the screen to save and exit.

2️⃣ Now, for the second piece of this puzzle, you need a powerful app I’ve mentioned before called Key Mapper. It’s completely free, and while it does require some deep system permissions in order to do what it needs to do, it doesn’t share, sell, or do anything shady with data — and it’s open source, too, so anyone can look at the underlying code and confirm that it’s telling the truth.

Once you have Key Mapper installed:

• Open up the app and follow the prompts to allow it the necessary forms of access (which, again, are genuinely needed in order for the app to be able to detect your physical button presses and map ’em to different actions).
• On the app’s main screen, tap the plus icon in the bottom-center area.
• Then tap the red Record Trigger button and press either the volume-up or volume-down button on the side of your phone.
• On the next screen, change the option toward the bottom from “Short press” to “Long press.” You could also go with “Double press,” if you’d rather.
• Next, tap “Actions” at the top of the screen, then tap the Add Action button and select “Launch app shortcut” (within the “Apps” section).
• Tap “Popup Widget,” then find and select the widget you just created a minute ago.

If you really want to get fancy, you can tap “Constraints” at the top of the screen and create specific limitations for when your widget-summoning action will be recognized. For instance, you might want to create a constraint that says the long-press action will work only when you aren’t actively playing media on your device — to avoid any potential conflicts with actual volume adjustments you might be trying to make during such moments.

But the basics are now in place, and once you’re ready to get your rule active, you can just tap the floppy disk icon in the lower-right corner of the screen to save and exit.

And that’s it: All that’s left is to press and hold whichever volume key you selected and watch your wonderful new on-demand floating widget appear out of thin air. You can move or resize it by pressing and holding anywhere on the widget. And when you’re ready to dismiss it, you can tap anywhere on the screen outside of the widget area — or swipe in any direction on the widget itself to send it a-scurryin’ away.

JR Raphael, IDG

Remember, too: You could conceivably keep numerous widgets available on-demand with this same setup — one with a long-press of your volume-up key, another with a long-press of volume-down, another with a double-press of volume-up, and so on.

The power is in your hands. Use it wisely — and try not to make your iPhone-totin’ colleagues too jealous, all right?!

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