Google, Please Let Me Turn Off Pixel’s “At a Glance”

Part of the beauty of Android has always been its openness to customization. If you’ve hung around this website at all over its 11 years (!) of existence, you might have participated in various ways to show off how much fun you have in taking part in that customization. We often share home screen layouts, icon packs, and wallpapers we find to be “hot,” take pride in how much time we put into a phone’s look, that sort of thing.

As someone who has spent countless hours finding the perfect weather or clock widget to sit as the centerpiece to my main home screen, I’ve got to say, Google’s “At a Glance” thing on the Pixel Launcher drives me nuts. What an unfriendly-to-personalization piece of software it is.

At some point with the launch of Google’s Pixel line of phones (I think it was the Pixel 2 launch), they introduced “At a Glance” as the smart-ish weather and date widget space filler at the top of the main home screen of the Pixel Launcher. If you tap on its date it’ll open the calendar, or you can fire up weather in Google Search by tapping on the current weather it displays. If you want it to, it can remind you about upcoming calendar events and upcoming alerts from a work profile.

One thing you can’t do is turn it off. If you own a Pixel phone and run the out-of-box Pixel Launcher, rather than a 3rd party launcher, you are stuck with “At a Glance” at the top of your home screen for life. You can turn on or off the calendar and work profile integration, but the date and weather are forever at the top of that main home screen. So if you wanted to put a cooler weather widget from an app that specializes in weather, unlike Google Search, you would have to put that in addition to “At a Glance.” And nobody is out here trying to have double weather widgets on their pretty home screen.

Of course, as Nova Bro in the comments has already suggested by this point in the article , “You could just install a 3rd party launcher!” Yes, you could! That’s the beauty of Android, as I mentioned in the opening. But I like the way the Pixel Launcher feels, the Discover feed it enables off to the left, the bounciness of the app drawer, placement of the search bar, how it handles app folders, etc. The only thing I don’t like is “At a Glance.” I just want to turn it off, man.

Google, can you please let me turn off “At a Glance?” I promise I’ll still use Google Calendar and Search. I don’t need these added shortcuts to both. I’d ask for custom icon pack support too, but let’s start here.