Google recently released version 11.0 of Google Maps beta in the Play Store. An APK teardown of this app reveals that the company is preparing a new homescreen widget for Maps. While the feature is not live yet for users, Dylan Roussel of 9to5Google could enable it manually on their phone. You can see the Google Maps homescreen widget in action in the screenshot below.
As you can see in this screenshot, the upcoming Google Maps widget doesn’t look too different from the recently added Chrome Quick Action Search widget. It has the Material You design language written all over it. The widget features a prominent search bar up top, with multiple shortcuts underneath. You have one-tap options for Home, Restaurants, Bakery, Groceries, Gas, etc. These shortcuts are essentially the same that you can see below the search bar in the main Maps app. The Maps widget is resizable, so you can add as many shortcuts as you want. However, it only accommodates four buttons in a row, so if you add more shortcuts, the widget will get bigger. You can downsize it to show less than four shortcuts as well. The smaller-sized widget looks more adorable than the bigger one, of course.
Google Maps homescreen widget supports dynamic coloring on Android 12
As you’d expect, Google is adding dynamic coloring support to the upcoming Google Maps homescreen widget on Android 12. For the uninitiated, dynamic coloring is a new feature that the company has introduced to its Material You design language in the latest iteration of its Android OS. It will be only available in Pixel phones though, at least for the time being. Powered by the monet theme engine, Android 12’s dynamic coloring automatically extracts the color scheme of your wallpaper and applies it to the UI element of supported apps and widgets, as well as across the system. As you can see in the screenshot below, the Google Maps widget has adopted the greenish color scheme of the wallpaper. The images attached above also showed the widget color-matching the wallpaper.
According to the report, the upcoming Google Maps homescreen widget will also be available for devices running Android 11. But it will lack dynamic coloring support for obvious reasons and will likely feature a blue hue.
