xda-developers: Google Translate gets a new “Translate Quick Actions” widget with Material You design

Friday, April 29, 2022

Google Translate gets a new “Translate Quick Actions” widget with Material You design

After years of neglect, home screen widgets finally received a big facelift in Android 12. The new widgets follow Material You guidelines and are more useful, responsive, and interactive. Many popular Google apps such as Gmail, YouTube Music, Google Drive, and Maps have already received refreshed home screen widgets. Now one more Google app is getting a widget refresh: Google Translate.

When the Google Translate app received its big Material You redesign late last year, it didn’t bring any update to the home screen widget. But that’s finally changing as Google has started rolling out a revamped Google Translate widget.

Say hello, hola, namaste or konnichiwa to the new Google Translate widget on Android. Learn more → https://t.co/w2BcBo0ozi pic.twitter.com/RHQ7b0SXRl

— Google (@Google) April 28, 2022

The previous widget was quite basic in nature and only offered a quick 1×1 shortcut that you can link to open either the text, camera, conversation, or write mode activity. The new Translate Quick Actions widget is more capable and useful, offering shortcuts to voice translation, conversation, transcribe, and camera mode.

Google Translate Material You home screen widget

Screenshots credit: Twitter user @pulkit_bbk

The top row displays the currently set language pairing, while a clipboard shortcut appears on the right side. The number of shortcuts changes dynamically as you resize the widget; at max, you can display up to four quick actions. On devices running Android 12, the widget fully supports Dynamic Color theming and takes on the dominant color of your wallpaper.

The new Translate Quick Actions widget hasn’t rolled out widely. It wasn’t available on my Android 12 phone with Google Translate v6.35. Google’s tweet doesn’t reveal much about exact availability. In any case, it shouldn’t be too long before the new widget starts rolling out to everyone.