08 May 2026

feedAndroid Developers Blog

Gratitude saw 25% higher retention for widget users

Posted by Ash Nohe and Amrit Sanjeev, Android Developer Relations Engineers

Practicing gratitude may decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety, and improve mental health and life satisfaction1. Consistent gratitude practice may lead to sustained improvements that last months2. The mindfulness app Gratitude encourages consistency through micro daily journaling, affirmations, and vision boards. The app has over 6 million downloads, 150 thousand 5-star ratings, and 100 million journal entries logged.

Developers Divij Gupta and Narendra Aanjna developed widgets for each of their app's core user journeys. Their goal was to meet users in their everyday moments without requiring the overhead of a full app session.

By surfacing interactive journaling prompts, affirmations, vision board images and metrics directly on the user's home screen, the team lowered the barrier to entry for daily reflection and reported a 25% increase in retention for widget users and ~1K weekly journal entries from widgets. This increase in user loyalty translates to tangible health outcomes for the users: consistent habit formations that support long-term mental well-being.

"Widgets helped us make the app more present in users' daily routines by providing quick inspiration, reminders, and reflections directly on the home screen. This increased engagement and made it easier for users to stay consistent with their mindfulness practices." - Divij Gupta



The Challenge: modernize without decreasing retention

While the impact of widgets was clear, Gratitude's original XML-based RemoteViews implementation created technical debt. As the app's design system evolved toward Material 3, the legacy widgets became increasingly difficult to align with the modern UI. Every visual update required manual XML overhead and brittle workarounds, slowing developer velocity.



The Solution Part 1: migrating from XML to Jetpack Glance

To modernize their widgets, the team turned to Jetpack Glance.

They first consulted the Widgets on Android design page and canonical widget layouts to understand best practices for displaying information within a limited amount of space.

Then, they migrated their widget suite to Jetpack Glance. This declarative framework enabled the developers to move from planning to shipping in less than a month, saving about 50% development time, and saw two additional advantages:

  • Replacing restrictive XML layouts with declarative code made the codebase easier to read, maintain, and reduced developer effort.
  • Jetpack Glance allowed the team to more easily implement dynamic colors, flexible resizing, and expanded configuration options. These features ensure the widgets harmonize with a user's unique home screen layout.


The following GIF shows two Gratitude widgets and adaptive resizing:

While Glance simplified the UI, the team noted that testing across various OEM launchers was also essential to ensure layout consistency across devices.

The team also implemented Generated Widget Previews so users can see personalized previews. They noted that testing Generated Previews could be slow, as the previews are rate limited to preserve battery. To bypass the rate limiting for testing, use the adb command:

adb shell device_config put systemui

generated_preview_api_reset_interval_ms 0

All of their efforts have made the Gratitude widget high quality and differentiated.

The Solution Part 2: promote new widgets in-app

The developers then used in-app widget pinning to increase widget discoverability and widget installs. Asking users to install widgets at a contextually relevant moment within the app helps users find their widgets without needing to go through the system widget picker. The following GIF shows Gratitude's bottom sheet to add widgets from within the app:


The team also refactored widget packages, which changed widget receiver paths and caused widgets to be deleted from users' home screens. Using previously stored user flags to identify widget users, they triggered another requestPinGlanceAppWidget prompt inviting widget users to use the new modernized widgets.

Developer Tip: To maintain widget installs while migrating from RemoteViews to Jetpack Glance, ensure your GlanceAppWidgetReceiver uses the same class name and package as your previous AppWidgetProvider in the Android Manifest. If a new class name or package location is required, follow the Gratitude's lead by using in-app pinning to help users restore their widgets.

The strategy is working, as 10% of total DAU have adopted widgets.

Conclusion

This Gratitude story shows that widgets can be tools for habit formation. By implementing quick actions to self-reflect right from the home screen, the team may have improved user loyalty. Gratitude reduced technical debt and modernized their widgets by adopting Jetpack Glance, and prompted users to add widgets within their app.

"Our experience with Jetpack Glance has been excellent. The Compose-based approach feels much more modern, flexible, and aligned with the way we build the rest of our UI today. It allows us to express widget layouts more naturally, reuse familiar Compose components, and iterate on UI changes much faster. Many of the UI constraints we previously faced with RemoteViews are no longer an issue, which made it easier to build widgets that better match our app's design and experience." - Divij Gupta

Getting Started

To get started with Jetpack Glance and learn about the technologies mentioned in this post, see these guides:

See other widget case studies:

1: Diniz, G., Korkes, L., Tristão, L. S., Pelegrini, R., Bellodi, P. L., & Bernardo, W. M. (2023). The effects of gratitude interventions: a systematic review and meta-analysis. einstein (Sao Paulo)., 21, eRW0371. https://doi.org/10.31744/einstein_journal/2023RW0371

2: Bohlmeijer, E., Kraiss, J., Schotanus-Dijkstra, M., & ten Klooster, P. (2022). Gratitude as mood mediates the effects of a 6-weeks gratitude intervention on mental well-being: post hoc analysis of a randomized controlled trial. Front. Psychol., 12, 799447. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.799447

08 May 2026 4:00pm GMT

07 May 2026

feedAndroid Developers Blog

A look ahead: Making it easier and faster to publish safer apps

Posted by Vijaya Kaza, VP, Product, App & Ecosystem Trust


The mobile ecosystem is always evolving, bringing both new opportunities and new threats. Through these changes, Android and Google Play remain committed to ensuring that billions of users can continue to enjoy their apps with confidence and developer innovation can thrive. Earlier this year, we shared how Android and Google Play kept the ecosystem safe in 2025 by deepening our investments in AI and real-time defenses. Today, we're giving you a look at how we're making it easier and faster than ever for millions of developers to publish safer apps.

Simpler ways to build safer apps from the start

To help you catch potential issues before you hit submit, we're integrating insights and new customized guidance built with AI to your publishing journey:

  • Catch policy issues while you code with expanded Play Policy Insights in Android Studio, which now offer warnings for common issues, like missing login credentials. Later this year, when you choose to connect your Play developer account directly to Android Studio, you'll get tailored insights.
  • Choose the right SDKs with confidence by leveraging SDK Index. Later this year, we are bringing SDK insights directly into your development workflow so you can instantly see which SDKs comply with Play policies.

More powerful protection for your business and users

With new ways to stay ahead of fraud and abuse, and better tools to protect your users, we're also making it easier to secure your app's revenue and reputation.

  • Detect security threats and abuse faster with our stronger Play Integrity API, which developers rely on to make billions of checks everyday to help keep their business secure. With significantly shorter warm-up latency, you can use these real-time checks in your most speed-critical user journeys, like logins or payments, to catch unauthorized access and risky interactions.
  • Simplify how you manage user privacy with easy-to-integrate tools like the contact picker and location button to give users clearer choices. We're also updating our policies to raise the standard for user privacy.
  • Future-proofing app signing security on your behalf. We're adding support for post-quantum cryptography in Play App Signing this year, which will protect your apps and app updates from potential threats with the emergence of quantum computing.

Faster, more predictable app publishing

We know how important it is to maintain a predictable release cycle, so we're making the publishing process faster and more transparent.

  • Avoid unexpected review rejections with our expanding pre-review checks, which now identify unnecessary photo permission requests and other common violations before you submit.
  • Improve the speed and predictability of your review cycles by using the new release status API to check if your release is approved and published. We also added a new way for you to block new commits if a review is already in progress, so you don't unintentionally restart your place in the queue.
  • Publish your releases even faster when we change our review architecture later this year to enable parallel publishing and faster reviews for your test tracks. You'll be able to isolate your closed, open, and production tracks so that a review on one track no longer holds up updates on another.
  • Track your release history with the Submission history log later this year. Built at your request, this feature provides a complete record of every time you send an app or update for review and its status. This makes it easier for your team to coordinate and troubleshoot without digging through multiple menus.
  • Manage business changes securely with the account transfers feature to help you move ownership to new partners, entities, or team members (video). We've designed this highly developer-requested feature with safeguards to protect your business from fraud and account hijacking.
  • Get the right policy support when you need it. In the coming months you'll see AI-powered recommendations directly in your Play Console that help you resolve minor issues immediately. For more complex issues, you can create a ticket to connect with our policy specialists. We're also giving new developers more guided support, including new Play Academy courses, to publish their first app with confidence. Later this year, we'll expand this coaching experience for new developers.

Stronger security across the ecosystem

Finally, we're bringing developer verification to the entire Android ecosystem to add another layer of security and make it much harder for malicious actors to repeatedly spread harm. Starting in September, these protections will roll out in select countries to help users feel more confident in the apps they download and without changing most users' install experience. We will also update Android Bench to uplift the entire ecosystem's ability to build and launch safer, higher quality apps using generative AI.

What's next

Google Play is committed to helping you grow your business while keeping users safe, and we appreciate your continued feedback on the tools and programs. Thank you for partnering with us to make Android and Google Play a secure, trusted platform for everyone.

  • Android security ecosystem
  • Play Policy Insights
  • SDK compliance tools
  • Real-time fraud detection
  • Post-quantum cryptography for apps
  • Google Play parallel publishing
  • Release status API
  • Developer account transfers
  • AI-powered developer support
  • Android developer verification

07 May 2026 5:00pm GMT

04 May 2026

feedAndroid Developers Blog

Gemini and Firebase AI Logic enabled Karrot to increase sales with a translation feature built in under 2 weeks

Posted by Thomas Ezan, Sr Developer Relations Engineer and Tracy Agyemang, Product Marketing Manager

Karrot is a hyperlocal, community-driven peer-to-peer marketplace app that enables users to buy, sell, and trade items with other verified users. Since launching in South Korea in 2015, the platform has expanded into global markets, amassing over 43 million registered users.

After launching in North America, engineers at Karrot observed that 30% of users in the region use a non-English device language, such as Spanish. To make the app more accessible, the team wanted to bring seamless translation functionality to Karrot quickly and at scale. The developers determined that the most efficient way to implement quality translations would be through integrating an AI service directly into the app, so they selected the Firebase AI Logic and its Android SDK to access Gemini Flash Lite, which led to higher purchasing conversion among non-English users.


Integrating Gemini Firebase AI Logic

The team initially tested two on-device options: the ML Kit Translation SDK and Gemini Nano. But the team found challenges with each: ML Kit Translation didn't meet the team's quality expectations, and Gemini Nano, if it isn't already on the device, required the user to download the model data.

The team then tested Firebase AI Logic. By calling the Gemini API directly from the app, Firebase AI Logic delivered accuracy at speeds that mirrored a natural conversational cadence.

Integrating Firebase AI Logic into the app was a "remarkably straightforward experience," according to TaeGyu An, an Android Software Engineer on Karrot's Mobile Platform team. TaeGyu and the team used the platform's documentation and code samples to build a proof of concept in under three hours.

This allowed the team to spend more time refining prompts and finding optimal configuration values. "Even without extensive experience writing prompts, the official documentation's guides and tips made it easy to quickly identify the right direction for improving translation quality," said WonJoong Lee, an Android Software Engineer on Karrot's North America Product Team.

This low barrier to entry and rapid turnaround time enabled engineers to keep development costs low and go from proof of concept to production code in just two weeks-all without setting up a dedicated backend. That also freed up time to focus on UX and policy design, such as opt-in behavior and the conditions for the translation banner.

Driving sales with enhanced AI features


Since implementing translation using Gemini and Firebase AI Logic, the Karrot team observed higher purchasing conversion among non-English users, indicating that the translation feature is helping drive sales.

Of users who used a non-English device language, one in three of them who were shown the translation banner actively used the feature. The team has also observed that buyers offered translation functionality were 2.4X more likely to start a chat with a seller than those who weren't.

The flexibility and simplicity of deploying Firebase AI Logic has led the team to explore other features to simplify the workstreams of its engineers. "It's rewarding to build features that scale across diverse Android devices while helping neighbors connect and interact within their local communities," concluded TaeGyu.

Going forward, the team plans to implement Server Prompt Templates to adjust prompts after release without shipping a new version of the app. This, combined with Remote Config, should help the team iterate faster and reduce operational overhead.

Get started

Learn how to build Gemini-enabled features like AI translations and in-app personalization and more with Firebase AI Logic to deliver better experiences to your users, faster.

04 May 2026 5:00pm GMT