As of a few days ago something updated on my Android phone (I have noticed the UI looks slightly different in other apps as well) and now the Beeminder widgets look really bad:
I don’t remember exactly what they looked like before but they definitely looked better than this!
Are you on Beedroid 5?
We had to upgrade our target Android version or we couldn’t stay in the Play Store. This makes 5he default launcher change how it handles the widget background and automatic corner rounding.
I was able to change some of the text to be automatically sized between a minimum and maximum size, which fixed some longstanding issues and, I think, improved on net how it looked on the devices and configurations I was looking at.
Android does, however, helpfully tell us that there are nearly 1800 configurations. :). Which device is that–or at least what are the screen details?
Sorry, should have provided more details in the first place! Yes, I am on Beedroid 5.0.0. I have a Samsung Galaxy A13, running Android 13. Also possibly relevant is that I am using Nova Launcher.
I’m not suggesting this as a fix–but what happens if you stretch the widget across two vertical cells?
my widgets now look more round, after the update? not a big fan, but i’ll get used to it. the goal names don’t obscure anything, at least.
The roundness is a weird thing.
Android 12 (API 31) has a whole rounded corner launcher … thing, and the OS will round the corners of your widget. This means your widget needs to understand that, especially if you have any content near the corners. We had rounded corners before, but they are less rounded than what Android 12 suggests as reasonable.
There’s a (n over-)complicated way to set your app up so that it grabs the rounded corner value from the OS or uses a reasonable default. I set it up, double, triple, quadruple checked it–and the rounded corner value I was getting from the OS didn’t match the roundedness the stock launcher on the phones were using. I shook my head, put it on the backlog, set it back to what it used to be but snapped it to the closest 4, uh, units?, making it a little more rounded than before.
(We had a Google-enforced deadline that “helped inform our priorities” 
)
I’d suspect on that screenshot the launcher/OS may be doing roundedness–but the Duolingo widget is less rounded than the Beeminder ones… the plot thickens.
(@enbee, mind telling me what device/launcher that is? If you’d rather not share publicly could you DM me here or email support@beeminder.com?)
I want to get this fixed up, but it’s not super obvious to me what the right answer is. Before, were you able to see the countdown, delta, and goal name in that size widget?
With Android 12’s enforced roundedness, I pushed the goal name up a smidgen, since the text autosizing we get to use for widgets doesn’t take Android 12+'s rounded corners into account.
It seems like it’d be tricky to push the countdown much higher, with the plus and checkmark, but it there isn’t a technical concern. It might be a decent place to start, unless these other questions shake something loose. Is there a better way to show the plus and the checkmark? Android, in general, recommends making widgets drop information the smaller they are. Does it make more sense to drop the delta, for instance?
We don’t get the full set of Android tools for doing widget layouts, unfortunately, and currently we support Android from API level 23 up, which means we can’t rely on layout options that are only available in API 31 (we can use them, but we need a fallback).
i think the longer i look at it, what bugs me more than the roundness is the rectangle-ness of it? i feel like the widgets were square, before the update? (or maybe my memory is wrong and they were never square and it was just an optical illusion?)
anyway, my phone settings tell me the following: Huawei Honor 10, EMUI version 10.0.0, Android version 10. i had to look up what a launcher even is, so i’d say i’m 99% certain i don’t use one, i’d probably know about it otherwise. hope this helps!
I honestly don’t exactly remember what it looked like before. Here’s a screenshot from 2016, which of course is a long time ago:
But I think it looked similar to that, but maybe with thinner borders.
