Android 15 Might Bring Back Lock Screen Widgets
Android 15 will definitely have a lock screen. Android 14 QPR2 beta released on Tuesday and Android spokesperson Mishal Rahman discovered an unfinished hidden feature that provides unlocked screen widgets. We've been waiting for this ever since Apple's big lock screen widget was released in iOS 16.
Rahman created a new "community" feature similar to widgets on the lock screen. Once you enable this feature and swipe from the right side of the lock screen, a pencil icon will appear. Tapping the icon will open a list of widgets and you can move some widgets to your lock screen. Now, in this unfinished state, the lock screen clock and notification bar UI is locked at the top by default as many widgets still don't know how to get rid of it. This is a catastrophe.
Whenever one smartphone operating system does something, another tends to copy it, and in 2022, iOS added a lock screen. Two years later, Google has had plenty of time to fine-tune and copy the feature. The fact is that in Android 4.2 in 2012, widgets appeared on the lock screen. Google removed this feature two years later in Android 5.0, so essentially Android is a copy of Android iOS. Some of this code is back, all lock screen widgets were created 10 years ago and still had the "keyboard" flag on Android 4.2.
The lock screen widget is, oddly enough, called a "community area," and Rahman speculates that this is because this particular UI test was done on tablets in docked mode. "Public" means everyone in your family can see it, and it may be a good idea to limit the amount of personal data that can be seen without using the lock screen. However, this is one of the missing experimental features, and it's hard to imagine Google not allowing phones to do this when IS is enabled.
