Android home screen widgets are getting a massive upgrade

At Google I/O 2026, the Android team has announced a major overhaul to how widgets work on your Android phone, watch, and car dashboard. By introducing a brand-new underlying rendering engine called Remote Compose to power the Jetpack Glance developer framework, Google is making widgets more interactive, visually stunning, and battery-efficient.

Previously, widgets across mobile (RemoteViews/XML) and wearables (ProtoLayout) relied on separate, fragmented codebases. This is where Remote Compose comes in, tearing down the wall between mobile and wearable development, and even beyond. This is a new adaptive API that handles logic and rich animations directly within the system layer, eliminating the need to wake up the host app. While developers use the Jetpack Glance framework to easily design these experiences with modern Kotlin APIs, Remote Compose is the powerful engine under the hood that makes the magic happen.

Remote Compose can supercharge what widgets can do, with these new features introduced in Jetpack Glance this year:

The new Snap Scroll feature allows developers to add a slick, snap-to-page behavior to vertically scrolling widgets. As you swipe vertically, the widget will perfectly “snap” to the next clean page or piece of information. This allows you to browse bite-sized content with ease, without a long list looking awkwardly cut off in the middle.

App developers can now bring custom shapes and highly tactile interaction states directly into widget layers without hurting device performance. This means your home screen widgets can now feature smooth, custom fluid shapes, morphing animations, and highly responsive buttons that fluidly change shape or “pop” when you tap them.

To make hitting your daily goals a little more fun, Google is introducing native Particle Effects into widgets made through Remote Compose. When you achieve a major milestone directly tracked by a widget — such as hitting your daily 10,000-step count or completing a meditation session — the widget can burst into a celebratory shower of digital confetti right on your home screen to reward your progress, all without draining your battery.

Remote Compose includes a smooth, fade-and-morph transition directly into the framework by default. As users drag to scale their widgets, the widget layout fluidly recalibrates in real time, so you won’t experience jarring layout jumps or content clipping when resizing widgets.

Dynamic Theming

Because Remote Compose natively integrates with the device’s system layer, it unlocks true, universal dynamic theming. When developers use Google’s official widget templates, a single widget can automatically adjust its colors and styling to perfectly match your personal phone wallpaper theme, and then smoothly shift its color palette to blend right into your car’s dashboard UI when you connect to Android Auto.

“Streak” is a brand-new canonical layout (a standardized widget template) provided by Google. This caters to fitness, productivity, and habit-tracking apps that want a widget to visually showcase consecutive-day completions. For users, this means more apps can easily display a streak widget thanks to this template, so you can choose to be reminded of your progress right on your home screen.

When are these features coming to my phone?

These new Remote Compose features will be natively supported on Android 16 and above. For older devices running Android 15 and below, the Jetpack Glance framework will automatically provide safe “fallback” options (meaning the widgets will still work, but they will use traditional, static scrolling and layouts).

As an end consumer, you will start seeing these ultra-smooth animations, particle effects, and resizing transitions look their best once developers update their apps to support the new engine, and your phone is running Android 16 or above.