Google widget shortcuts arrive for your Android home screen

Google clearly loves building new apps and services, but maybe even more than that, it loves coming up with new ways for you to access them. When the company has something it really wants to promote, you had better believe that you’ll be be seeing shortcuts pop up all over your Android device, ensuring you’re never more than a couple taps away. After checking out some early work last year towards bringing us yet another convenient way to access that Googley goodness, we’re now finally seeing the arrival of new shortcuts in the Google Search home screen widget.

We got our first look at this system back in September, when we uncovered development efforts towards a new “shortcut” option for the 4×1 Google widget — this is the one you can manually add to home screen pages, not the launcher’s bottom-of-the-screen bar. That would allow you to select from one of several options to add a new icon to the widget for quickly initiating tools like translation, or searching for current weather conditions. Later we spotted an alternate interface with the shortcut separated from the widget’s main search bar, living off in a circle to the side.

With this week’s release of the latest 16.3.34 build of the Google Android app, 9to5Google noticed that these widget shortcuts are now available for everyone. The look we’re getting is the first version of the interface we shared, with our shortcut icons directly integrated into the main search bar.

All told, you have your choice of eight to add: Translate (text), Translate (camera), Song Search, Weather, Sports, Dictionary, Homework, and Finance. You can also elect to add none at all, and just keep the existing voice search and Lens icons.

In addition to the shortcuts, we also see the widget showing off the easy custom color sliders we previewed last fall.