Android Auto home screen widgets look nearly ready to go

Android Auto has been stepping into the spotlight a little more frequently than usual lately, finding itself on the receiving end of big changes like its recent Gemini rollout. Another major upgrade we’ve been tracking for a while now concerns efforts to bring support for Android widgets to Auto’s dashboard. And while that’s still not quite ready to go, we’ve got some updates to share on Google’s progress.

When we brought you a preview of how widget support was coming together last fall, everything was more than a little rough around the edges — honestly, as we should only expect from what’s still a very much still in-development feature. Besides many widgets themselves not behaving correctly on the Auto dash, the interface we had for setting them up was really awkward, and felt like the sort of cobbled-together UI we’d never expect to see the light of day in a finished feature. The good news there: It won’t, and Google has already crafted a much more refined interface.

Looking through Android Auto version 16.8.161804-release.daily, we’re able to see a lot of progress. For starters, at last check-in, Google hadn’t even given this support a proper name, and was still referring to it by its codename, Earth.

That’s now replaced by the much more sensible “Car widgets” label, complete with a nice description.

Once we tap through to that, we’re now presented with a widget picker that looks and feels much more like the one we’re familiar with from our Android home screens, including both a featured section and a complete list of available options. Selecting any of those opens up a preview of how the widgets will appear.

Beyond just cleaning things up greatly, we also see a functional improvement in the form of a search bar up top — again, just like widgets on your phone’s home screen.

Now, we still don’t have clear evidence pointing to Google’s intentions for when it might actually want to announce these widgets and start pushing the changes out to users, but Google I/O is just a few weeks away, and there’s probably no better time of year to show off new Auto features like this — we’re just saying.

Finally, we’re leaving you with one more small Android Auto tweak we’ve spotted, as the system appears to be preparing some slightly revised icons for its weather card:

Again, neither these new weather icons nor the dashboard widget support are yet live in Android Auto, but Google could introduce these pretty much whenever it wants to.