Google designed the At a Glance widget forPixel phonesto give users important information about their upcoming appointments, the weather, or flights right from the home screen and lock screen. Although it is supposed to offer information on other modes of transportation such as trains, that hasn’t been the case in all parts of the world. We’re now starting to see train alerts on our Pixel’s At a Glance widget, indicating that a wider rollout is underway across the globe.
AP’s Google editor Manuel Vonau discovered this updated At a Glance widget for a long-distance train booked throughDeutsche Bahn, Germany’s primary railway operator. While the At a Glance settings page has a specific toggle forTravel, which includes trains, not everybody has managed to find their upcoming train trips on the widget.
But that appears to be changing now, though it’s unclear what caused it. For some additional context, the trip was booked from the Deutsche Bahn app, with Gmail then picking up the trip details from the email.
Interestingly, Deutsche Bahn appears to have redesigned its email layout not too long ago, offering all the trip details within the body of the email rather than bundling them in the PDF attachment. Meanwhile, the train operator’s confirmation email also has a new design within the Gmail app, which may have also played a part in enabling this change.
Old layout of the email (left); the updated email confirmation on Gmail (right)
In addition to providing the time and other details of your upcoming trains, At a Glance also shows the platforms for both the departure and arrival stations with this new change. However, since this info is pulled up from the confirmation email, its visibility could differ based on the train operator you’re using.
Platform numbers for departure and arrival stations
To be clear, Google’s At a Glancesupport pagealready mentions trains, with support for “platform, station name, status or seat information.” But it’s likely that the rollout so far has been limited based on geography.
So what exactly led to this change? Our guess is that Google always wanted to have this information displayed within At a Glance, but since a lot depends on individual train operators to enable this, the rollout may have been slow. So if you have an upcoming long-distance train and find similar results on your At a Glance widget outside the US, you’re not the only one.
Some big changes are in the offing for the At a Glance widget, with Google finally letting usersmove the widgetacross the home screen orremove it entirely. Both could be a part of theAndroid 14 QPR2release, which is currently in the beta stages, while the stable release should make its way to devices by March 2024.
