Widgets Why

[royal hussar]

Hi Guys this is possibly a stupid question but I am fairly new to Android. My 16gb Nexus 7 Tablet has just been replaced with a 32 gb model fortunatly its running on the older 4.1.2 system and I can put up with the Update prompts for now as everything is working well. My question is, even over just two days I have aquired pages and pages of Widgets firstly what purpose do they serve ? and having read how to get rid of them I still cant get them to go. Tried holding them and looking for a bin but nothing appears.Are they using storage ? Any help would be appreciated and also is it possible to stop the Update notification ? however I will update when it seems the new 4.2 is satisfactory.

 

[bigtroutz]

the widget icons are there for you to select from to drag and drop into your Home pages. Typically apps give you a choice of various icon sizes / templates to choose from. They use a minor amount of general storage but that has little impact. What one does is pick the widget template you like best if you want an active icon on your home or lock screen and then press and hold it, drag it into home.. Those widgets you 'installed' and active on the home screen can be eliminated by the 'hold and drop on the X" process. You can eliminate the widget templates by uninstalling the apps that call them. You really don't need to worry about them clogging up your storage.

 

[odd1ne]

Widgets are those cool things you put on your homepages which show info like emails, clocks weather ect. They are one of the most popular things on Android. Most the time they are included as part of an app so they don't take up any extra memory unless you downloaded just a widget which would take extra memory.

As far as I'm aware I don't know a way of hiding them but then again they don't get in the way because they have there own section of the app draw.

Sent from my HTC Desire using Android Central Forums

 

[royal hussar]

Cheers chaps much appreciated

 

[NealJ777]

No one has told you what makes widgets so special. Widgets are one of the many things that set Android apart from iOS. Widgets are programs that sit on your home screen. Just one example would be a weather widget. I have a widget that tells me the current time and temperature and extended forecast. The widget updates automatically based on my physical location. If you had an iOS device you would have to open the weather app or the notification shade (I wonder where they got that idea?) to get that information.

With JB 4.2 I can put a widget on the lock screen (HD Widgets) and then I don't even have to unlock my Nexus 7 to view the weather.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

 

[royal hussar]

That sounds useful will experiment thank you. Neal

 

[Shilohcane]

This is a good example of a new Lock screen Widget for Twitter fans;

Plume updated with Android 4.2 lock screen widget

Plume updated with Android 4.2 lock screen widget | Android Central