Pixels don’t have widget stacks, but this app makes me miss them less

Widgets have been a part of the Android experience for a long time, and I use them every day. From controlling my earbuds and smart home devices to showing my agenda or to-do list, they’re an essential part of any mobile OS I use. One of my favorite widget features is widget stacks, something Samsung added to its phones in One UI 5 back in 2022. Google phones lack the feature, and it’s been a sticking point since I switched to a Pixel 10 Pro. Thankfully, I’ve found an alternative.

Before I talk about the new app that I’ve found, I should clarify what widget stacks are. On a Samsung phone, you can long-press a widget that’s already on your home screen and tap a Create stack button. This will pull up all of the widgets on your phone that fit in the same grid size as the one that’s already there. Once you’ve selected the second widget, One UI stacks it on top of the one that was already on your home screen. Now, you can scroll horizontally through those widgets.

The reason I love widget stacks so much is that it keeps my home screen looking neat while also providing high information density. I can have all the widgets I want without needing multiple home screens.

On my Pixel 10 Pro, I found my ideal workaround with Smartspacer — an app that opens up Google’s At a Glance widget and makes it infinitely customizable. One of its features, Expanded Smartspace, lets you tap on At a Glance to open a list of user-selected widgets. It isn’t quite the same as Samsung’s widget stacks, but it’s more than close enough for me. Now I can keep my home screen free of oddly shaped and inconsistent widgets while being able to summon everything I need with a single tap.

To use Expanded Smartspace, you’ll need to download Shizuku and mess around with some developer options. Thankfully, that process is straightforward and explained well in the app itself.

When you have Shizuku up and running, you can go into Smartspacer’s settings and find the Expanded submenu. In here, you can customize the expanded mode to your liking, choosing whether or not you want a search box, if you can use expanded mode on the lock screen, and so on. Once you’re happy with those settings, tapping the At a Glance widget will open a whole new screen, and you can start adding widgets with the little plus button.

There are settings for each widget that dictate grid size, padding, forcing round corners, and whether it shows when the phone is locked. The latter is a useful one, as you can prevent widgets that might show personal information from working on your lock screen.

If you’re a Lawnchair user, you can even have the expanded smartspace replace your Google Discover feed to the left of your home screen, something I’d do if I didn’t prefer to stick to the stock Pixel Launcher.

Aside from the expanded mode, Smartspacer can do so much more with At a Glance. Targets let you choose items that will appear in At a Glance as needed, along with what order they’ll be in if more than one is available. I have the At a Glance target at the top, ensuring all of the standard functionality is present, along with a dynamic Google Wallet target that shows event tickets and a Now Playing target that shows what song has been detected.

Complications are items that stay in the At a Glance widget at all times when the dynamic targets aren’t doing anything. As with targets, I have the standard Google complications first, followed by sleep information from Samsung Health and the battery level of my Galaxy Buds 3 Pro when they’re connected.

Without Smartspacer, the At a Glance widget is an annoying bar of text I wish I could remove from the top of my home screen. The fact that Google doesn’t let you remove it is frustrating, especially when there’s no built-in way to properly customize it.

With Smartspacer, it becomes something I use all day, easily providing information and widget access whenever and wherever I need it, and I couldn’t use the Pixel’s stock launcher without it. Smartspacer has made the At a Glance widget an essential part of my Pixel experience, and brought back a similar functionality to my beloved One UI widget stacks.

Have you tried Smartspacer? Do you have other alternatives for widget stacks? Please let us know in the comments.