Android 12 and ‘Live Space’ could supercharge the At a Glance widget

Android 12 could supercharge the At a Glance widget

What you need to know

• The beta version of the Google app has been updated to version 12.23.
• A new feature called ‘Live Space’ has been discovered.
• Live Space adds even more alert options to the At a Glance widget in Android 12.

The At a Glance widget is enabled by default whenever you use the Pixel Launcher, but it could see some major upgrades soon. The team over at 9to5Google discovered a new feature called ‘Live Space,’ which enables quite a few features for the At a Glance widget. Currently, the widget will show you the time, upcoming calendar events, weather, upcoming reminders, and any alerts if you are using a work profile.

But with Live Space, these notifications are taken up a notch or two. For one, there’s much better integration with Google Assistant, as Live Space can be personalized based on different settings that are enabled. These include showing travel plans, commute reminders with estimated arrival times, and even shopping lists or Google Pay rewards when you enter a specific store.

According to the screenshots obtained, there are different sections available after Live Space has been enabled for Google Assistant.

Personalize

• Home and work: For Commute information
• Location: Show relevant content based on your location
• Default weather: Show weather updates for this place if your current location data is not available
• Sensitive content on lockscreen

Proactive moments

• Weather: Current weather info
• Upcoming: Calendar events and reminders
• Travel: Flights
• At a store: Shopping lists and Google Pay rewards cards when you’re in supported stores
• Commute & Time to Leave: Reminders, estimated arrival times, and traffic info
• Alerts: Severe weather alerts
• Work Profile: Calendar events and reminders from work profile

Curiously, under “Proactive moments,” there’s a headphone icon with a toggle next to it, but there’s no description. Perhaps this could be a way to turn on or off Google’s Now Playing feature, or it could be something else entirely.

These new features were discovered in the latest Google app beta, which sports a version number of 12.23. Unfortunately, it’s not available for everyone just yet, even if you are already running Android 12 Beta 2 with the latest Google app update on your compatible Google Pixel device.

Along with all of the pretty Material You design changes and features for one-handed usability coming to Android 12, Google is pushing pretty hard to improve the widget experience. This comes as a bit of a surprise given Google’s history with widgets and pretty much never really updating them.

From the looks of it, Live Space appears ready to go, and it’s likely that we’re just waiting for Google to “flip the switch” on the feature.