I found the best app for Material 3 Expressive widgets; here’s how to use it

Google is implementing a big redesign of Android with Material 3 Expressive. This updated design language will spread across apps and Android itself with the upcoming Android 16 QPR1 update. And despite updating most of its apps, Google is overlooking widgets again with this release, keeping the same old Material You design for several of them, while Apple and other Android OEMs like Samsung have taken widget design more seriously.

But if, like me, you’d like to see a cohesive vision of Google’s widgets with a splash of Material 3 Expressive, you’re in luck. I turned to the Play Store and found this $1 set of 300+ Material widgets that perfectly capture Android’s latest design and add some needed fun to my home screen. Best part? I didn’t need KWGT to make it work.

To get the most out of Material You Widgets (yes, the app’s name feels dated now, but don’t worry, the widgets themselves are all Expressive), we need to grant some permissions. The most important one is allowing background access, letting the app run in the background — even if you haven’t opened it — so that it can update things like weather, device info, and more for the relevant widgets.

Everything else is self-explanatory: choosing units, time format, what happens when you tap on widgets, etc. The one you’ll want to focus on is widget padding. It dictates the size of the non-responsive (more on that later) widgets within their placement on your home screen. If you’re using a custom launcher with an unusual grid size, this slider will help you if you find widgets are too small or are getting cut off.

Plus, when you’re planning your home screen, you need to pick between square or responsive widgets. A square widget will maintain its shape regardless of how you resize it in the grid, while a responsive one will stretch to fill the available room you’ve given it. In my setup, with the widgets I like to use, I’ve mostly stuck to square.

Something to note is that square widgets, confusingly, don’t have to be square. All sorts of shapes from the Material 3 Expressive library are available; here, square refers to how the widget will behave.

On my Galaxy S24 Ultra, I’ve combined these widgets with one of the included wallpapers and the Pix Material You icon pack to make a purple theme that matches my phone’s Titanium Violet color. Samsung’s launcher is a great place to use widgets like this because widget stacks let you retain the functionality of other widgets without ruining the look, like putting the noise cancellation controls for my Buds 3 Pro in a stack with Google Search.

I’ve got two battery widgets stacked together, one for my phone and one for my earbuds, in the top left. There is also a smartwatch battery widget, but when I tried to use it, the widget showed the name of my Galaxy Watch 6, but didn’t show the battery level. Hopefully, that’s something that can be fixed in future updates.

The other widgets I’ve enjoyed most so far are for quick settings and Google Search. I like having quick access to my torch and sound profiles, and the various search widgets this app includes all look better than anything Google is doing right now, although that’s not difficult.

As I mentioned at the outset, there are 314 widgets in the app, so there are plenty of options to get your home screen looking perfect. More than 40 of those widgets were added in an update at the beginning of August, so this collection is still under active development and is being expanded. You have widget categories covering apps, battery, calendar, clock, earbuds, watches, folders, games, music, and more.

The widgets that add games to your homescreen are a lot of fun, too. These let you play Tic Tac Toe against an AI opponent, provide a shortcut to Chrome’s Dino game, and, my personal favorite, Snake. To play Snake, you have to place two widgets: the game itself and a D Pad controller. It works surprisingly well and is an easy way to pass a few seconds when you’re waiting in line and want to occupy your mind without doom-scrolling TikTok.

One of the most frustrating parts of a new design paradigm in Android is waiting for everything to catch up. It takes time for apps and other Android skins to adopt new versions of Material Design. That will undoubtedly be the case here with Expressive, but the Material You Widgets pack goes a long way to making that wait easier. My home screen is one of the most important parts of my phone, and these widgets already bring the flavor of Material 3 Expressive to my Samsung phone right now.