Hey r/androiddev / r/Android,

I wear an Amazfit smartwatch daily, and like many wearable users, I ran into an annoying problem: the official companion app provides almost zero usable home screen widgets.

The few default widgets available are either clunky, ancient-looking RemoteViews from Android 8 days, or force you to open the full app every single time just to check simple stats like steps or sleep.

Instead of waiting for official updates that probably won't come, I decided to build my own custom home screen widget.

What I Wanted vs What I Built:
  1. Clean At-a-Glance Dashboard: Instead of cluttering the home screen with multiple separate widgets, I built a compact widget that lets me tap/switch between 10k Steps Ring, Cycling Distance, and Sleep Breakdown.
Tech Stack:
  • UI: Jetpack Compose Glance (androidx.glance:glance-appwidget)
  • Background Tasks: Android WorkManager + Coroutines & Flow
  • Design: Material 3 Dark / OLED minimal styling
Thoughts on Jetpack Glance:

Building AppWidgets with Glance is so much better than writing old XML RemoteViews. You still have to work within widget rendering constraints (e.g. layout budget and bitmap drawing for custom circular progress rings), but declarative UI on the home screen feels like modern Android dev should.

Has anyone else built custom widgets to replace missing OEM ones? Curious to hear your approach!

submitted by /u/is2am
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