Sunday, December 22, 2024

Google may let you resize Quick Settings tiles in Android 16

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Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

TL;DR

  • Android 16 may let you resize Quick Settings tiles, according to evidence we discovered in the latest Android beta.
  • You’ll be able to resize any Quick Settings tiles, though they can only be either 1×1 or 2×1 in size.
  • This resizable Quick Settings tiles feature seems to be part of the overhauled Quick Settings panel that Google is working on for Android 16.

Last month, we reported that Google is working on a major overhaul of Android’s Quick Settings panel for next year’s Android 16 update. From what we managed to enable, it looks like Google wants Android to show more notifications and Quick Settings tiles on screen, and the best way to do that is to split the notifications and Quick Settings panels into two separate pages. However, there’s another way to fit more Quick Settings tiles on screen, and that’s by making them resizable, which is something that Google is seemingly working on for Android 16.

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While I was digging through the latest Android beta update that Google released earlier this week, I found that Google had made more progress on overhauling Android’s Quick Settings panel. I discovered that Google had made some categories to better organize your Quick Settings tiles, a change that will make it easier to find the right Quick Settings tile you want to add to the panel. Shortly after that discovery, though, I found an even bigger change: Quick Settings tiles were now resizable!

To be clear, Quick Settings tiles aren’t resizable by default in the most recent Android 15 QPR1 Beta 3 release, so don’t bother trying to resize them on your Pixel. However, if you enable the in-development Quick Settings panel in Beta 3, then they are resizable. All you have to do to resize them is to tap on any tile while in the editor view and then drag the dot left or right to shrink or expand it. Tiles can be either 1×1 or 2×1 in size, allowing you to fit as little as 8 or as many as 16 tiles in a single page. You can resize any tile, even ones provided by third-party apps, though obviously not every tile will have a useful description when it’s expanded.

For comparison, here’s an image that shows the default Quick Settings layout in Android 15 vs Android 16:

Android 15 vs Android 16 Quick Settings panel

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

And here’s an image that shows some more Quick Settings panel layouts you’ll be able to make thanks to this feature:

Android 16 Quick Settings panel at different sizes 2

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

Lastly, here’s a short video that demonstrates how you’ll be able to resize Quick Settings tiles in Android 16:

Personally, I’m not a fan of 1×1 tiles that don’t have a label, but I can understand why many might prefer them. They take up a lot less space on screen, so you can fit a lot more of them on a single page in the Quick Settings panel.

One thing that isn’t clear to me is why the new Quick Settings panel doesn’t take up the entire screen considering it no longer has to leave room for any notifications. It’s possible that will change, though, especially as we’re still quite a ways off from Android 16’s expected release date, meaning there’s plenty of time for Google to make changes to its plans for Android’s new Quick Settings panel. That could include scrapping this new resizable Quick Settings tile feature entirely, too, by the way, but we’ll keep an eye out to see if that happens.

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