It may be the silliest idea to some, but it may be the most interesting idea to others. Wearable Widgets, an app that transforms your phone’s widgets into Wear OS (né Android Wear) watch faces, has added support for complications. So instead of replacing your entire watch face with a widget, you can leave whichever design you like and choose a widget from your phone as a complication inside it. How well does it work? I tested it to find out.
I started by installing Wearable Widgets on both my phone and my watch (you can look for it in the Play Store on your watch or install it via a web browser). Then, in any watch face that supports complications, I tapped one of them and scrolled down to find Wearable Widgets among the options. That provided a list of all the widgets available on my phone grouped by app.
Left: Wearable Widgets among Complications. Middle/Right: Scrolling through the widgets.
The first widget that came to mind is Fitbit’s primary goal 1×1 round icon. I thought it would be perfect as a complication. However, I had forgotten that the widget displays a little text below it, which then pushes the circle up to be off-center.
Adding a Fitbit primary goal widget.
I tried a few other 1×1 widgets that sounded great as complications. One of them was SmartThings’ routines. On the phone, when I choose to place this widget on my homescreen, it opens up a small settings screen that lets me choose the routine to apply. I wondered if and how Wearable Widgets would be able to handle that, and turns out it does so quite well. A message to complete the action on my phone flashed so I grabbed my Pixel and SmartThings’ widget setting screen was open. I chose the routine I wanted. From then on, a simple tap on it on my watch activated it.
Adding a SmartThings Routine widget.
The same misalignment happened here, though. The widget has text below it, so the icon is pushed up a little and stays off-center. Other widgets from LIFX, Wemo, Gmail, Drive, and more had the same issue. But some widgets that don’t have any text do show up well, though they still remain heavily pixelated.
Left: Off-center LIFX widget. Middle/right: Centered widgets from Todoist and Shazam.
The other side effect of using a Wearable Widgets complication is that it shows a persistent notification on your phone. Thankfully, you can minimize it or disable it completely if you don’t like the constant reminder.
Overall, the premise works, but it’s a little annoying to see the 1×1 widgets go off-center when there’s text below them, and to have the icons so pixelated. Once those issues are fixed, Wearable Widgets has a nice but very niche idea.
I can’t imagine myself using any widget as a complication other than Fitbit’s daily goal tracker, but I suppose many users would like to have some specific toggles or their own Tasker widgets as easily accessible complications on their watch faces. Sterling Udell, the developer behind the app, also shared several other ideas for widgets that could work well as complications so check it out before you dismiss this as a ridiculous idea.
Wearable Widget is free — in-app purchases let you use more than one widget at a time — so it’s easy to check out and decide if you want more or not.
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