Hey all — I've been building a small personal app that shows step count on the Z Flip cover screen, and I've hit a wall that I think is actually a platform limitation, not something wrong with my app. Posting here because I'd love to be proven wrong, and because I suspect other cover-screen widget devs have hit the exact same thing.

The setup: My widget is a normal AppWidgetProvider/Jetpack Glance widget, registered with both the standard android.appwidget.provider metadata and the com.samsung.android.appwidget.provider metadata pointing at a <samsung-appwidget-provider display="sub_screen"> resource — which is exactly the pattern Samsung Notes uses for its own smaller cover widgets (I checked by decompiling the public Samsung Notes APK). Small minWidth/minHeight, targetCellWidth/targetCellHeight set to 2x2 and 4x2, the works.

The result: it only ever shows up as a single full 4x4 tile in the cover-screen widget picker. Never smaller.

What made me suspicious it's not my manifest: I checked Outlook and Spotify's cover-screen widgets too — both are big apps that would absolutely want a nicer cover-screen presence, and both are also stuck at 4x4-only. Meanwhile Samsung's own apps (Notes, Reminder, Weather, the phone dialer's recent-calls widget) get 2x2/4x2/tiny sizes just fine.

What I found digging into it on-device (connected via adb, compared dumpsys appwidget output for both my app and Notes, and pulled/inspected SystemUI.apk):

  • The cover-screen grid is actually built on AOSP's own "Communal Hub" (Glanceable Hub) framework — the same multi-size widget grid Google built for Pixel Tablet's Hub Mode — running inside SystemUI on the cover display.
  • The OS parses my widget's small size attributes correctly — dumpsys appwidget shows it registering at exactly the dp values I declared, same as Notes' widgets. So it's not a manifest/XML mistake.
  • I even matched Notes' widgetCategory value bit-for-bit (both end up keyguard-only at runtime) as a live A/B test on my own device. No change — still 4x4 only.

That combination (correct registration + still forced to one size, only for non-Samsung apps) makes me think there's a package-identity allowlist gating which apps' widgets get offered at non-default sizes in the cover picker, separate from anything in the widget's own manifest.

Question for the sub: has anyone actually gotten a genuinely third-party (not Samsung-signed) widget to show up smaller than 4x4 in the native cover-screen picker, on any One UI version? I know apps like CoverWidgets and CoverScreen OS exist and can put arbitrary widgets on the cover screen — but as far as I can tell they do it by taking over the whole cover display themselves (their own widget host + presentation), not by getting Samsung's native picker to offer a smaller slot for someone else's widget. If anyone's actually cracked the native-picker case, or knows for a fact this is a partner-program/allowlist thing, I'd love to know — trying to decide whether to keep chasing this or just build my own host like those apps do.

Device/version for reference: Z Flip 6 (SM-F741B), Android 16, One UI 8.

submitted by /u/azzimuth_SE
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