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From: Andrew <andrew@spam.net>
Newsgroups: comp.mobile.android
Subject: Re: Weather icon?
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2024 19:03:52 -0000 (UTC)
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David Oseas wrote on Sat, 6 Jul 2024 08:34:10 -0700 :

>> Philosophically, I'm not sure why widgets exist, but I think they exist
>> because people want one-tap access to the "insides" of a given app.
> 
> Widgets were originally designed to present an at-a-glance display of 
> info, without the need to open up an app.
> 
> Think clock, weather, music currently playing, today's agenda, network 
> connectivity, etc.  Imagine how annoying it would be to have to tap & 
> open up an app every time to get that kind of info.

Thank you for explaining the philosophy of widgets, which I completely
agree with, in that pre-defined widgets allow people to dive deeply into
existing apps (as you described above) to access, in a single tap, an
at-a-glance display.

My only philosophical point is that I can do all that, I think, using
one-tap shortcuts, which are as easy to create as tapping on a button.

For example, if someone wants to dive into an app without climbing the
convoluted stairs to start at the app and then click down into that app to
find the "display" that the user desires, they have, I think, two choices:

1. They can find if that app supplies a widget to do what they want, or,
2. They can just find the display in the app and create a shortcut to it.

While there are many apps which create shortcuts to "displays" deep within
an app, the advantage of the one-tap shortcuts is that they can be created
for every single public activity that exists on any given Android phone.

That's likely many thousands of "display" pages are accessible to the user
via one-tap shortcuts while probably only hundreds of displays are
accessible via widgets.

Still - widgets might do things that Activities don't so I took the
opportunity to open the question just now of the Android newsgroup:
 *What does a Widget do that a one-tap shortcut to an Android Activity not do?*
 <https://www.novabbs.com/computers/article-flat.php?id=53978&group=comp.mobile.android#53978>