How to Enable the Google Home Widget

How to Enable the Google Home Widget

Introduction

Several months back, Google announced that they were finally going to be releasing a widget for the Google Home application. You could have a list of your favorite home devices right there in the widget to be quickly controlled. You may have forgotten about it because it was announced and then just nothing sort of happened. Although I’m here to tell you that I have had it for several weeks now, and I just haven’t talked about it. A lot of people have been commenting, saying, “How do you have that? What did you do?” I’m going to tell you in this video. It’s very, very simple, very, very quick, and you too can have this handy Google Home widget, which we’ll talk about how it’s working a little bit too after I show you how to do it.

Setting Up the Google Home Widget

Okay, so you can see my Pixel Fold here, and that is the widget. Of course, if I move this up out of the way, I can resize this, and it will sort of change the layout a little bit, shifting things around. How do we do this though? So the first thing you’re going to want to do is go into the Google Play Store. Make sure you have the Home app installed. Once you’ve done that, let’s open up the Google Home application, and we’re looking for this beaker up here in the top right-hand corner. By clicking on this, you’re going to have the ability to join the public preview.

A lot of Android applications allow you to join the beta on the page in the App Store; you’ll see it somewhere around here. The ability to join the beta with the Google Home app is essentially kind of within the app. So you should see an option here to join the public preview. Once you have done that, all you need to do is wait a little while. It might take a couple of hours, but eventually, it’s going to pop up as an option. From there, just long press on your screen, select widgets, and it will be called Home. If we go ahead and select this, we’ll drag it onto an additional page, and I’ll show you the setup process.

Customizing Your Widget

So you can either do your favorites or custom. I think custom works really well. Keep in mind the order you select these in; that’s the order that they’re going to be on the widget. So we’re going to come down here to my studio. We’re going to say desk lamp, logo light, round lamp, square lamp, and then just all of the lights. That’s fine. If we save that, that will be our widget. Again, if you resize this, it’s going to kind of change how they are sorted and how they’re appearing on the screen.

Widget Performance

Now, in general, how well does this work? Fairly well. It’s not perfect though. I find it on my Pixel Fold it’s much more consistent on other devices like my Z Fold 6 or my OnePlus Open. It seems as though sometimes I will go to click on one of these options, and I just heard it clicked, but I forgot that I moved things around, and that’s not actually my desk lamp anymore. Let’s turn off the logo light.

You’ll click on one of these options, and it’s as if the widget has to refresh. Then you can click it again, and then it will actually do what it’s supposed to do. It seems like on the Pixel devices, it works a bit better, and that refresh thing very, very rarely happens. But again, overall, the widget does work pretty well.

Editing and Customization Options

Now, one thing that I feel like I should double-check here: can we do widget settings? Yes, we can actually go back in and customize this a second time, which is a really, really nice touch. A couple of other things I want to quickly point out is the fact that if you do have cameras attached to this—I have Wyze cameras—you will see them in here. So I can do some of these backyard cameras, whatever it might be, in addition to my logo light, and you can have that set up that way.

Now look, you’re not going to see like a live feed of that camera on your desktop. What you’ll be able to do, though, is just simply click on them. I wanted to see that look like that was going to resize in a weird way. Okay, just kind of glitchy a little bit, whatever. If you click on one of them, it will open it up, and it will start playing that camera, assuming that Wyze is going to play nicely with Google Home. There you go, that camera up and running just fine.

Device Compatibility

Now, something else that’s worth pointing out is that when I edit this widget here like that, and you go to widget controls, custom, you’ll see custom and then you’ll see favorites. That is not the case on other devices. This is my OnePlus Open. You can see here that my option is to edit favorites, and this has actually been really weird filming this. If I click on this, now it looks like it is allowing me to change the options that I currently have on the widget, but literally 45 seconds ago when I was filming this, I did the exact same thing, and it was having me change my favorites—like these are my favorites in the Home app. You can see here, and it was going to default to those.

So there are definitely some kinks and wrinkles to be ironed out in this application. On non-Pixel devices, your mileage may vary. But as you can see, it is at least mostly functional on these other devices.

 

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