Your Android home screen widgets are about to get a ton of upgrades

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Your Android home screen widgets are about to get a ton of upgrades

Credit: Adamya Sharma / Android Authority

TL;DR

• Google has announced a major overhaul for Android, wearable, and car dashboard widgets by introducing a new underlying rendering engine in Jetpack Glance called Remote Compose.


• The upgrade eliminates fragmented codebases and battery drain by handling logic, smooth resizing transitions, dynamic theming, and particle effects directly within the system layer.


• When app developers incorporate these features into their widgets, they will be natively supported on Android 16 and above, while older devices running Android 15 and below will receive safe, static fallback options.

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.

Source: Your Android home screen widgets are about to get a ton of upgrades