Nova Widget Application
Android App.
An AISYNX product: an Android widget platform for discovering, customising and placing well-designed home-screen widgets — clocks, calendars, weather, battery and productivity.
- Status
- In development
- Type
- AISYNX product
- Category
- Android App
- Client
- AISYNX
Design concept with sample data, not a screenshot of a released product.
Less screen. More signal.
The problem
The home screen is the most-seen surface on a phone, and often the least considered.
Widgets let people see the time, their next event, the weather or their battery at a glance, without opening an app. But the widgets available on a typical phone come from many different apps, in many different styles and sizes.
Nova is designed around a simple idea: a curated collection of widgets that look like they belong together, can be adjusted to suit each person, and are easy to put on the home screen.
Why we built it
Nova is built as a widget platform rather than a single widget: a collection meant to share one design language, with consistency designed in from the start rather than added later.
Nova has its own design system with OLED, dark and light themes, and every widget is defined against the same shared sizes, themes and refresh rules — so a clock, a calendar and a battery gauge are built to sit together on one screen.
The solution
Nova organises widgets into a catalogue that people can browse, search and save. Choosing a widget opens a configuration screen with a live preview, where the size and visual theme can be adjusted before the widget is added to the home screen. The same widget can be placed more than once with different settings.
Catalogue & discovery
Featured and new widgets, nine categories and instant local search across names, descriptions and tags.
Configure with a live preview
Sizes and themes are validated against each widget’s definition, so only supported combinations can be saved.
Add to home screen
Placement uses Android’s own pin-widget flow, keeping each instance independent.
What’s built
Widget engine
Widgets rendered with Jetpack Glance, with shared definitions for sizes, themes, refresh policies and actions.
Initial widget catalogue
Mono Clock, Calendar Agenda, Battery Gauge, Weather Forecast and Focus & Tasks.
Local-first catalogue
Catalogue data is cached locally, validated before use and falls back safely when offline or when remote data is invalid.
Explore, search & saved
Explore screen, category browsing, deterministic search, widget detail and saved widgets.
Configuration & placement
Configuration with live preview, saved configurations and home-screen placement with multiple instances.
Verified through automated tests, lint and release builds. On-device and performance validation are still to be completed.
Product & engineering decisions
Feature modules
Clean Architecture across 24 modules separating core services, features and widget categories.
Catalogue separate from rendering
What a widget is (its catalogue entry) is kept apart from how it runs, so content can change without touching the engine.
Conservative compatibility
A saved configuration is only used if it exactly matches the widget definition version it was created for.
Secure storage
Sensitive values use Android Keystore-backed storage.
Technical approach
- Kotlin, Jetpack Compose and Jetpack Glance
- Hilt dependency injection; Room and DataStore for local data
- Gradle convention plugins with dev, staging and production flavours
- Targets current Android SDK levels
Current status
Nova is in development. Catalogue, discovery, configuration and placement are implemented and pass automated tests and release builds; testing on physical devices is still to come.
Building a product
of your own?
We bring the same problem-first approach to client products. Tell us what you want to build and we will help you scope a sensible first version.