After updating the Individual variant with message and call notifications, as well as shared location, earlier this year, Google Contacts has rolled out a redesign of the Favorite contacts widget.
The previous design just showed large rectangular profile images: “Create a shortcut for up to 7 of your top starred contacts.”
An update today switches to circular avatars with the person’s first and last name listed below: “A shortcut for all your * favorite contacts.”
Instead of a tiled layout, it’s now a pretty standard grid formation for the images, which helps if you have a lot of favorites. It’s less visually interesting, but more consistent and basically looks like the version that appears in the Highlights tab.
Meanwhile, this widget can note birthdays with a badged icon, so it’s more glanceable and info-rich. The themed Dynamic Color background is unchanged, while it remains highly resizable
The Favorite contacts redesign is rolling out as a server-side update with version 4.45 of Google Contacts for Android.
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