Popup Widget 2 Turns Icons Into Floating Widgets on Your Home Screen

My home screen setups tend to be ultra minimal. The normal setup for all of my phones consists of a main page with a clock widget that shows weather, coupled with a set of six icon shortcuts to my most used apps. I then tend to create at least one other page with a calendar widget set on top of a Google Search bar. That’s pretty much it. I just never could get into setting up or wanting to flip through five or six or seven pages of home screen stuff. That just seemed like home screen overkill and a waste of time. For the most part, everything I need to do can be done from 1-2 screens.

But what if I wanted to keep that same minimal setup, yet still have an option to add additional widgets that could come in handy, like Hangouts or Gmail? This sweet little app called Popup Widget 2 is exactly what I was looking for. 

Popup Widget 2 lets you turn home screen icons into widgets that pop-up on top of your home screen. So rather than looking for an additional page to add widgets to, you can simply create an app shortcut that will launch them. It gets even more powerful when you create a single shortcut that can launch multiple widgets. For example, I could have a shortcut that pops up both Gmail and Hangouts widgets on a single screen, so that I wouldn’t have to open each app individually.

You can set custom icons for each shortcut, set dim levels, change background colors, set their size, tell them when to auto-close, give them animations and effects, and even tell the system to hide the status bar when widgets are popped up. This is a pretty impressive app.

Play Link ($1.65)

Cheers Bryant!